It now looks increasingly likely that the killing of Josh Itseli was accidental rather than deliberate.
The 20-year-old was a member of a street gang of young, violent, volatile, reckless and extremely dangerous drug dealers and criminals.
They made their money from – amongst other crimes – selling cocaine, and consequently they also had access to lethal firearms and ammunition.
Last week they secured a firearm they did not know how to use.
The AR-15 is a military weapon, an assault rifle, for use in combat zones and war. The semi-automatic weapon can fire hundreds of rounds a minute, but is not designed for an urban criminal setting.
Young criminals armed with such lethal weapons often end up doing as much, if not more harm to themselves, than others.
This is what seems to have happened in Drimnagh in the early hours of last Monday morning.
It is not easy to handle firearms, particularly complex military grade weapons.
Gardaí and Defence Forces personnel undergo training that involves academic and practical examinations.
They are taught by professionals, practice on ranges in secure locations and are tested to the highest standard before being granted permission to carry a gun.
It is different in organised crime and it is clear that Josh Itseli and his gang of criminal associates were handed a weapon they did not know how to use.
The gang even put out a request on social media for information or instructions on how to use the AR-15.
“Anyone know how to use this thing”, or words to that effect, were posted the night before.
Tragically in this case it was the gang members inability to handle that weapon which has apparently led to the premature death of one of their own.
Josh Itseli has become another victim of a criminal subculture that invariably leads to a jail cell or a grave.
The quantities of cannabis, cocaine and heroin coming into the country have dramatically increased in recent years as illustrated by the rise in the number and volume of garda seizures.
Over €4 million worth of drugs were seized this week alone in Dublin and Wexford.
Ironically the lethal violence that comes with the drugs trade has not, in the same period, been reflected in the country’s growing illicit drugs market.
The gun attacks and murders that come with the drugs trade have in fact declined as reflected in the annual reduction in gangland murders over the past 20 years.
However any complacency that may have set in has been shattered by the chaotic violence that unexpectedly erupted in a quiet residential suburb earlier this week on a quiet Bank Holiday weekend.
A young man in south Dublin became the first person to be killed this year because of his involvement in organised crime.
Josh Itseli was only 20 years of age when he died in the early hours of Monday morning.
He was shot a number of times with a semi-automatic weapon at a 12.15am.
The sound of the gunfire that echoed around Drimnagh that night is more commonly heard in a warzone.
Unfortunately on Monday, this residential area was in many ways a warzone.
The situation that developed there involved a military-grade firearm and an explosive device which necessitated the army be called in.
Residents, parents, and children had to leave their homes after midnight in their pyjamas and night attire while the Defence Forces’ bomb disposal team made a pipe bomb safe.
Josh Itseli was out with four associates, fellow gang members, two in their teens, two in their 20s.
They were driving a black Mercedes, most likely stolen. How they came to have such a high-powered luxury car is under investigation.
It is, however, standard practice for more senior criminal gang figures to supply younger members with free drugs, cash and flash cars to entice and encourage them in their careers in organised crime.
The main criminal gangs in Ireland have access to fleets of cars, some bought, some leased and some stolen on demand
The Dublin branch of the transnational Kinahan gang, the Byrne Organised Crime Group, operated a car business as a front for its criminal enterprise for years.
LS Cars did not sell too many cars but used the business to launder drugs money, travel, pay for expensive holidays and supply high-end and luxury cars to all the gang members and their partners.
The Criminal Assets Bureau shut it down.
The gang of young, violent, unstable and highly dangerous criminals gang members in the Mercedes on Sunday night were armed with an AR-15 rifle and carrying a pipe bomb.
They were wearing bullet-proof vests and were on their way to a bomb the house of a rival south Dublin gang member.
The animosity was most likely linked to the drugs trade and a dispute over turf between rival street drug dealing gangs.
Josh Itseli was a drug dealer in the Drimnagh area. He was a garda target and last year he was caught dealing cocaine in Landsdowne Valley Park.
He was charged with two offences and appeared before the district court.
However the case was deemed too serious for summary disposal and was sent forward to the higher Dublin Circuit Criminal Court where the penalties upon conviction are more severe.
Itseli gave his address as Leigh Valley, Ratoath, Co Meath, but a drug dealer in a dangerous business feuding with rival criminal moves around and that is what Josh Itseli did.
He lived in different addresses in Meath and Dublin, including with a relative in Kylemore, Ballyfermot.
Reared in Dublin, Josh Itseli’s family are originally from the Congo.
Organised crime practices diversity. It does not discriminate nor is it prejudiced when it comes to recruiting criminal gang members.
In this country, as in all countries, gang members and dangerous criminals come from any and all nationalities, religions and ethnic backgrounds.
What Josh Itseli did not seem to know in the early hours of last Monday morning was that the rival gang members already knew about the attack he was on his way to carry out on them. They were ready for him.
When his Mercedes came on to the Knocknarea Road it was rammed by a Volkswagen golf. Both cars had been fitted with false number plates.
In the chaos that followed, the AR-15 rile went off in the car, spraying bullets around. Josh Itseli was shot and fatally injured. He died at the scene.
Gardaí believe it is likely he was accidentally killed by one of his own who did not know how to handle the weapon.
The gunman also deliberately and indiscriminately fired several more shots from the rifle.
One of the bullets went through a window in the local community centre that had been occupied until 7pm that evening and hit a table inside.
There was no exchange of gunfire and gardaí do not believe any other firearm was discharged at the scene.
The gunman then fled up Curlew Road past the local day care centre and threw the gun into the surrounding hedge. Gardaí found it there later that day.
The rival gang members were well prepared. They not only rammed the Mercedes, they also had the back up of other street gang members in a silver Ford Focus and a white van.
The van was riddled with bullets but left the scene.
Gardaí later found it abandoned in Tallaght. The silver Ford Focus was abandoned on Sperrin Road, just 300 metres from the scene.
That car and the van, along with the Mercedes and the Golf have all been seized and are now being forensically examined.
Gardaí also seized a stolen Talaria Sting electric motorbike the rival gang drove around Dolphin Road, Crumlin Road and Davitt Road on Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday.
Two men in their 20s and a teenager got as far as Slievebloom Road, around a kilometre from the scene, before they were caught and arrested by a garda armed response unit.
All three were wearing bullet-proof vests.
It is not illegal to possess a bullet-proof vest and Hutch gang members, wore them during the height of the Hutch-Kinahan feud.
Derek ‘Del Boy’ Hutch was photographed wearing one while walking around Dublin city three years ago while a bullet-proof vest saved the life of Hutch gang member James Gately.
The 36-year-old had already survived one assassination attempt in Belfast when on 10 May 2017 he was shot five times in the upper chest and neck as he sat in his car at a Topaz filling station in Dublin.
Six Kinahan gang members were jailed for the attempted murder including the Kinahan hitman Caolan Smyth, who is serving 20 years.
One of the three males arrested and questioned by gardaí following the killing of Josh Itseli is an extremely violent and dangerous criminal who is out on bail.
He was charged in connection with a serious assault on a woman and granted bail in spite of garda objections. He is due back in court later this month.
There were others at the scene on both sides who got away that night; those in the van, in the Volkswagon, in the Ford Focus, the driver of the electric motorbike and the fifth person, a teenager, in the Mercedes.
Two days later the 17-year-old handed himself in to the investigation team at Sundrive Road Garda Station. He was later released. Gardaí are examining CCTV footage and are confident of identifying the others who were there.
The two men and the teenager arrested near the scene were questioned for two days before they were released on Wednesday. Gardaí say a case will be built and a file sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Garda analysis shows that there has, in recent years, been a move away from highly organised gangland murders to an upsurge in killings by unstructured localised crime gangs in Dublin.
The officer in charge of serious and organised crime said the recklessness, volatility and violent nature of the members of these gangs poses a serious challenge, as was evidenced this week.
However Assistant Commissioner Justin Kelly has insisted that local gardaí are tackling the street gangs in their areas and are supported by national units gathering intelligence and additional armed resources deployed at short notice when necessary.
He also said there has been a marked decrease in murder attempts and threats to life incidents by highly organised and well-financed crime groups.
Josh Itseli and his associates were not the most subtle or professional of gangland criminals.
They filmed and posted a video on social media of themselves driving around at speed before the attack. Some covered their faces, Josh did not.
Social media has become a major factor in organised crime. Street gang members use it to boast, show off and threaten rival gang members.
It only serves to underline their amateur and unpredictable characteristics.
Professional criminals and killers do not advertise on social media.
The preference of older or more experienced gunmen for pistols such as a Glock, which is relatively easy to conceal and use, is in marked contrast to the bravado of the younger criminals displaying larger and often unwieldy automatic and semi-automatic rifles and machine guns.
However to the young street gang members in Dublin, organised crime is exciting and something to be publicly celebrated.
The life for them is exhilarating, dangerous and attractive.
The money, the clothes, the cash, the cars, the beautiful women and men, the bling and the status that goes with being a gangster can prove irresistible to impressionable young minds who see little else of opportunity in life.
They believe they are invincible. This week has shown they are not.
The annual gangland murder rate has declined in recent years, from 23 in 2010, to 14 in 2016 during the height of the Hutch-Kinahan feud, down to three last year.
However the figures for the last six months show that a more a worrying trend has emerged.
There have been five gangland killings since last November.
Three of the victims were young men in their 20s, including Brandon Ledwidge who was shot dead in a street gang dispute over drug dealing turf in Finglas.
The figures also include the murders of the gunman Tristan Sherry, who was 26 and his victim 48-year-old Jason Hennessy, during the gun attack at Browne’s Steakhouse in Blanchardstown on Christmas Eve.
Eight men and teenage boys are currently before the courts in connection with that incident.
However this week, one of the teenagers was charged with an additional offence when the Children’s Court was told he was caught “red-handed” with a sawn-off shotgun which has “no lawful purpose” but “to seriously harm or kill someone”.
Garda Daniel Sweeney also testified that the incident was related to an ongoing feud and that the 17-year-old “associates with one side of organised crime groups in the feud” and that he “was present when two people were murdered”.
The seizure of the side-by-side double-barrelled shotgun brings to 25 the number of firearms including rifles, pistols and submachine guns the gardaí have seized since the start of the year.
The killing of Josh Itseli once again raises the wider issues around organised crime.
The proliferation of drug use in this country, particularly cocaine, and the apparent disconnect between the leisure activities of its more affluent and educated users and the shootings and killings of young men on the streets of Dublin.
The glamorous and the fashionable in the bars and the clubs, or the fitness fanatics in the sports clubs all over the country, who sneak into the toilets to snort a line of cocaine or nip outside to “spark up a spliff” while gazing out over the team’s playing fields, do not see the link between their preferred method of relaxation and the dead and injured bodies on the streets.
Senior gardaí have said cocaine is now seeping into every GAA club in the country.
The head of the Garda’s Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau pointed out last Christmas that the huge increase in cocaine in Ireland and Europe is not being driven by the vulnerable and addicted but by the educated and employed middle and upper classes, who believe it is acceptable to use the drug without taking responsibility for the organised crime it sustains.
Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland warned that their continued drug use would fuel the increasing levels of violence and murder associated with the international drugs trade.
Five months later it appears his warning is being ignored.
