House fire victims include former death row inmate
BBCA US woman who spent years on death row for murders she did not commit was among two people found dead after a house fire in the Republic of Ireland.
Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs died alongside County Galway man Kevin Kelly after a blaze at a house in rural County Galway on Tuesday morning.
Ms Jacobs, who was in her 70s, spent 17 years in prison in the US after she was accused of killing two police officers in Florida in 1976.
She was sentenced to the electric chair but it was later commuted to a life sentence. On her release she campaigned against the death penalty.
The house fire broke out at a rural house in Gleann Mhic Mhuireann, near the village of Casla in Connemara.
Firefighters and gardaí (Irish police) were alerted to the blaze at about 06:20 local time on Tuesday.
Photographs from the scene show a garda cordon blocking access to a property up a small county lane.
The bodies of Ms Jacobs and Mr Kelly, who was in his early 30s, were recovered from the property by firefighters.
The cause of the fire is under examination but Irish broadcaster RTÉ has reported that at this stage foul play is not suspected.
RTÉNearly 50 years earlier, Ms Jacobs's life changed dramatically when two policemen approached the car she was in at an interstate rest stop in Florida.
She was in the vehicle with her partner Jesse Tafero, her two young children and her partner's friend after the couple's car broke down.
The friend - Walter Rhodes - claimed to prosecutors that Ms Jacobs and Mr Tafero fired the shots and the pair were sentenced to death.
Mr Tafero died in a botched execution in 1990 while Ms Jacobs spent five years on death row.
The case against the couple was later called into doubt when Rhodes confessed to the killings, but he changed his story several times.
After her release from prison, Ms Jacobs married an Irishman and moved to County Galway.
Her husband, Peter Pringle, had also been wrongly convicted of a double murder.
He was sentenced to death after being accused of killing two police officers during a bank robbery in rural Ireland in 1980.
Mr Pringle was one of the last people to be sentenced to death before capital punishment was abolished in the Republic of Ireland.
He served almost 15 years in jail before being acquitted.
The couple, who met while she was giving a talk about her death row experience, later married in her native New York in 2011.
They worked to help others who had been wrongfully convicted to adjust to life after release from prison, with Ms Jacobs running a retreat for ex-inmates.
The couple took part in a BBC Radio Ulster documentary called Exonerated in 2017.
Following Tuesday's fire, the bodies of Ms Jacobs and Mr Kelly were taken to University Hospital Galway for post-mortem examinations.
GardaÍ have appealed for witnesses to the fire to them.