‘I was devastated. Really I can’t tell you the way I felt. Me and him were so close. My husband is dead 32 years, and Liam was always here with me, more like a husband than a son. Every time of think of it. The feeling I get; the lost feeling you get inside your body.”
For Ellen Bennett, a mother of eight, the memories of her son's death from a single punch have come flooding back this week. News emerged from Australia of the charging of Barry Lyttle, a 33-year-old Irishman, following an alleged "one-punch attack" that left his 31-year-old brother, Patrick Lyttle, critically ill.
Barry Lyttle had been in the country for a only few days with his 74-year-old father, Oliver, to visit Patrick, a backpacker. The brothers were on a night out in Sydney when the incident occurred. Patrick is now out of a coma.
Ellen Bennett, who is now in her 70s, says she knows something of the horror visited on the Lyttle family as a result of an apparent “moment of madness”.
Liam Bennett was 32 when he died from injuries sustained in a one-punch attack. From Emmet Road in Inchicore, Dublin, the unemployed single man had just phoned his mother on the afternoon of August 8th, 2013, to tell her he was on his way home. He said he was waiting for a bus on Tyrconnell Road in Inchicore, not far from the family home.
“I said I’d put the dinner on and have it ready for him,” says Ellen. “But it was the last time I heard his voice.”
Just after ending the call to his elderly mother, Liam was punched in a confrontation at the bus stop. He fell to the ground and hit the back of his head on the kerb. He lost consciousness and died in hospital a week later.
“I was absolutely shocked one punch could cause so much damage,” Ellen says. “There was no drink involved, nothing like that.”
Last November Alan Hatch, a 38-year-old from South Circular Road in Kilmainham, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to Liam Bennett’s unlawful killing; he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.
Hatch, with more than 30 previous convictions, claimed Liam threatened to “mill” him during a chance encounter at the bus stop. “I’m not a fighter. I never did boxing or martial arts or anything like that,” he told gardaí.
Nobody – not the Garda, Department of Justice or Central Statistics Office – records one-punch homicides or one-punch assaults. It is impossible to establish the extent of the problem in the Republic.
In other jurisdictions, including Northern Ireland and Australia, authorities track the phenomenon and have formulated responses.
In both jurisdictions, police have run publicity campaigns highlighting the facts that one-punch attacks can take the life of a victim and ruin the life of an attacker. In the North the warnings are reiterated at Christmas, when alcohol consumption is at its highest. About 20 people have died in the North from one-punch attacks since 2004.
Evidence from court cases in the Republic suggests there have been enough one-punch assaults to justify addressing, or at least quantifying, the problem here too.
Liam Bennett’s killing came a year after the death, at the age of 55, of the journalist Eugene Moloney, also from a single blow. He died as a result of brain injuries when he was punched by a stranger in a chance encounter on Camden Street in Dublin while making his way home from a night out.
On St Stephen’s Day in 2009 Brian Casey, a Co Clare teacher, was hit with a “haymaker” that broke his jaw in two places. His skull fractured when he hit the ground, and his injuries proved fatal.
In 2009 two men were jailed for their role in a one-punch attack during the robbery of Liam McGowan, a Leitrim man, on Hardwicke Street in north inner-city Dublin, in 2006; it also proved fatal.
In 2008 Michael Cronin was the victim of a one-punch attack in Limerick, falling to the ground “helplessly” and sustaining a brain injury. The 41-year-old died a month later.
In 1997 Eugene Flanagan , a 38-year-old father of four from Donnycarney, in north Dublin, died after an unprovoked one-punch attack outside a pub in Donnycarney.
For every death there are countless nonfatal one-punch attacks, many involving alcohol. In some cases those convicted have never come to the Garda’s attention before.
Dr David Menzies, a consultant in emergency medicine in St Vincent's University Hospital and clinical lead for emergency medical science at University College Dublin, says a single blow can prove fatal if it causes internal bleeding, via subdural or extradural haemorrhage.
In cases of subdural haemorrhage the veins leading to the brain tear, causing bleeding that fatally compresses the brain. It can also occur due to the brain being jolted in the head by a strong punch, tearing veins and resulting in the same bleeding.
In cases of extradural haemorrhage, victims are knocked out, then wake and seem to have recovered – before losing consciousness again.
“I don’t think it’s a problem of the 21st century,” Menzies says of one-punch attacks. “But I think there has been more focus on it now. Alcohol can be a real factor. It can make people more aggressive and also means people who are punched are less able to defend themselves and put their hands out to break a fall. And they are more compromised generally.”
