Brother ‘in shock’ after seeing gardai shoot George Nkencho outside home

The brother of George Nkencho has described seeing him get shot by gardai at the front of their Dublin home.

Emmanuel Nkencho said he and his sisters were “shocked, confused, sad” and “distressed” in the aftermath of the incident, and had asked gardai at the scene what had happened.

He told the inquest his sister had told gardai that their brother had mental health problems during the incident, but this was “quickly shut down”.

Mr Nkencho, 27, died outside his home in Dublin in December 2020 after being shot multiple times by members of a Garda armed support unit.

An inquest into his death, which began this week at Dublin District Coroner’s Court, heard from shop workers and customers who described seeing Mr Nkencho punch an assistant manager at a shop in Hartstown and members of the public who said they saw him holding a knife.

Emmanuel Nkencho, who was aged 20 at the time of the incident, said he had been studying in England but had come home for Christmas two weeks before the incident.

He said on that day, he had brought a parcel that had been delivered to the house to his sister Gloria when they heard noise at the front of the house.

He said his sister Grateful went downstairs first, then Gloria, and then he followed them downstairs and they looked through the window beside the front door.

He said when he first saw his brother, he was coming towards the front door of the house.

Emmanuel Nkencho said at one point his sister Gloria had opened the door and said “quite loud” that this was her brother and he had mental health problems.

He said that this was “quickly shut down when they told us to get back, get back” and Gloria closed the door.

“From where I was standing, I could see through the window, I could see my brother being shot,” he said in his deposition.

“I didn’t think that the police even carried guns. I thought they would maybe use a taser.”

He said his brother was not carrying “a machete” and that the knife he had “could have been taken off him”.

“It would not have been normal for George to be carrying a knife.”

He said he saw his brother being shot and then a knife “being swung by George”, and then George being shot again.

He said he believed his brother’s movements were “in response to him being shot”.

“I didn’t know what I was looking at. I then turned around because I didn’t want to see any more.”

He told the inquest his initial reaction was not to look and that he was in “a state of shock”.

He said he heard three more shots after he turned around.

He said he then saw his brother’s body “flat on the ground” and said there was “smoke coming out of his body” while people attempted to resuscitate him.

He said that he took five videos of the aftermath of the scene as the family asked gardai what happened, videos which were later submitted to GSOC.

He said: “I don’t even know if distress is a word. Shocked, confused, sad. There is a lot of words I can use, but, yeah, distress is definitely there as well.”

Victor Nkencho said he had just left the house and gone to the shop with a friend when he got a call from his sister Grateful.

He was 16 at the time, the youngest sibling of the family.

He said when he returned to the house he saw that neighbours and others had gathered near his house.

“It just happened so quick as well, we just left and then came back to this whole scene like this.”

He said he saw George’s body on the floor and people trying to resuscitate him before he was told by gardai to move back.

“I just seen a load of my neighbours, I think they informed me that my brother was shot, but I didn’t initially know it was George. So, obviously, my first instinct as a kid, I was only 16, was to look for George.

“So, I ran straight past my neighbour’s house, past the guard that was blocking me from entering, and then I entered my garden and that’s when I seen George, I seen a few people around him trying to resuscitate him.”