Four years for man who burned home of teacher and her sons

A MAN who set a teacher’s house alight as she and her two young sons slept in upstairs bedrooms was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment at the Circuit Court in Waterford yesterday.

A jury last week found Richard Nugent (23), of Andrew Street, Waterford, guilty of causing fire damage to the home and car of his then teacher, now aged 38, at her home on August 7th, 2003.

The only evidence that existed in relation to Nugent’s guilt was an admission he made some three weeks after the fire which he later retracted because, he maintained, he had felt pressured into making the admission.

Gardaí arrested Nugent, a father of one, after a tip-off from a member of the public, the trial last week heard. “I didn’t like her; she kept getting me kicked out of class,” Nugent told Sgt Shay Keevans under questioning some three weeks after the fire.

The woman had been sleeping upstairs in her Waterford city home as her sons, aged six and seven, slept in the next room.

Nugent, a bar manager in the city, has already spent 11 months in jail in relation to the matter but had been released pending his appeal. The woman, who cannot be named, told the court during the trial she had often stuck up for Nugent when other teachers at the school commented negatively about him.  Nugent had found her address on an envelope with a translucent address window at an office in the city centre school.

The woman told the jury she had gone to bed at 11.30pm on the day in question. Some hours later she was awoken. “I heard the smoke alarm; I thought it was faulty. I opened the bedroom door and I could see a cloud of black smoke.” She said: “I was hammering on the wall and calling them [her sons].” Visibly upset, she said: “I thought we got on okay; we seemed to get on; there were issues with other teachers.”

The woman, who was in court yesterday, had said in her victim impact statement: “The images and memories will never leave my consciousness.” She said she would “always have the scars” but thanked the gardaí and fire-fighters for helping her and her family in “moving forward”.

Judge Gerard Griffin sentenced Nugent to seven years in jail for the arson on the house, while he took the 11 months spent in prison into consideration and suspended a further two years.

Nugent was sentenced to three years for the attack on the car, with one year suspended. Both sentences will run concurrently. Leave to appeal was refused.