A TEENAGER has admitted killing a friend and injuring an elderly nun by dangerous driving when he was being chased by police.
After the public gallery was cleared at Downpatrick Crown Court, defence QC Neil Rafferty asked for all charges to be put to the 17-year-old again.
Standing outside the dock flanked by prison officers, with his mother and grandmother a few feet away, the teenager - who cannot be identified because of his age - replied "guilty" to the six charges against him.
He confessed to causing the death of Conal Daly, an 18-year-old from north Belfast, and causing grievous bodily injury to Josephine McAteer, a nun in her seventies, by driving dangerously on the Saintfield Road outside Belfast in October 2014.
He also pleaded guilty to driving dangerously on the Ormeau Road and Saintfield Road, two counts of assaulting police and causing criminal damage to a PSNI vehicle.
A Jaguar car the teenager was driving towards Carryduff ploughed into a Volkswagen Polo being driven in the opposite direction by 75-year-old Sr McAteer, from the Mercy Order.
While she is understood to have suffered two broken legs in the impact, Mr Daly - a former pupil at Edmund Rice College and who was in the back seat of the Jaguar - was fatally injured.
Mr Daly, from the Carrick Hill area, was one of three young men in the car. He was a son of Paul Daly, who was killed in a drugs-related shooting in Belfast in 2001.
Paramedics treated him at he scene and rushed him to the Royal Victoria Hospital but he succumbed to his injuries a short time later.
It was reported at the time the PSNI had been in pursuit of the "runaround" Jaguar from the roundabout at the top of the Ormeau Road when the chase came to a fatal end just a few miles up the road.
In court Mr Rafferty said he would be giving a report on the defendant's mental health to the probation service to assist it.
Remanding the teenager back into custody, Judge Piers Grant provisionally listed the sentencing hearing for June 24, adding that while it "may be academic", he was now automatically banned from driving.
