The family of murdered student Nicola Furlong are “devastated” her killer has returned to his home in the US after serving 10 years in prison.
Richard Hinds, 29, who strangled the 21-year-old in Japan in 2012, was freed last weekend. Yesterday, he was deported by Japanese immigration officials back to his family in Memphis, Tennessee.
Ms Furlong’s family, from Curracloe, Co Wexford, revealed they are “devastated” at his release. Her mum Angela said: “I just buckled over when I heard the news.
Read more: Dad's heartbreak as DCU student Nicola Furlong's killer to be released from jail
“I spent 10 years wondering how I would feel and now I know – it is hard to deal with. He goes ahead and lives his life and we have to live ours. I think at this stage we just have to put it behind us.”
Hinds was 19 when he strangled DCU student Nicola, an exchange student in Japan, in the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo. He was given the maximum sentence of no more than 10 years because he was a minor.
James Blackston was convicted of sexually assaulting Nicola’s friend during the taxi ride to the Keio Plaza and freed in 2015 after three years. Last week, Nicola’s dad Andrew said: “He should never again have been released. But it’s Japan, it’s their laws being applied and there is nothing I can do to stop this.
“He’s going to go back to America and continue insisting he is innocent so he can get on with his life.”
Nicola had been studying in a university north of Tokyo on a one-year DCU study abroad programme when Hinds strangled her. She and her friend took a train to Tokyo to go to a Nicky Minaj concert. They encountered Hinds and Blackston afterwards.
The men showed Nicola and her pal the way to the Shibuya district and later drank and danced with them at a bar. Nicola’s friend told a Tokyo court that she lost consciousness in the bar after drinking a shot of Tequila that Blackston gave her.
The men then took the women in a taxi and the taxi’s CCTV recorded the men speaking excitedly about what they planned to do sexually with the women. CCTV caught Hinds and Blackston ferrying Nicola and her pal across the lobby in hotel wheelchairs and into an elevator to a bedroom.
In 2013, judge Masaharu Ashizawa said Hinds had shown no remorse and his statements had “dishonoured” his victim. He added the Furlong family’s demand for a harsher sentence was “understandable”.
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