‘We have been left with a living image of Paul’

Paul McAuley has lain in a coma for the past five years, locked in a vegetative state and unable to communicate, and on Friday Jim McAuley appealed for anyone with information to help bring the family some closure by confiding what they knew to the police.

He said his son Paul, now 34, faced the rest of his life imprisoned inside his body where once he had been a volunteer with Foyle Search and Rescue, but that was before he was left for dead after being attacked by what he called “a murder gang” at a barbecue at a house on Chapel Road in the Waterside on the night of July 15, 2006.

Three days after the emotional appeal for those who know something to come forward, detectives in the Serious Crime Branch revealed that that three men, all in their 20s, had been arrested in various parts of the city on Monday morning, taken to Strand Road station for questioning in relation to the attempted murder of Mr McCauley, and were later released on bail pending further enquiries.

To date only one person has been prosecuted in relation to the attack on Paul McAuley. As yet no one has ever been charged with attempted murder.

Recalling the moment his family life was turned upside down, Mr McAuley said: “We got a phone call early on Sunday morning. We had an arrangement with the youngsters that if they had problems getting home to phone and some of us would pick them up,” he said.

“By the time I got to the phone they had rung off and I phoned Paul back on his mobile and left a message to say get back to me and that I would pick him up,” Mr McAuley said, but the call never came.

A car pulled up outside, and initially Mr McAuley thought it was his son, home safe from a fun night out: “I saw a car pull up outside the house and I thought that was the taxi home, but then I saw the white blouses, and I recognised them as police officers coming in.

Serious attack

“My heart sank, because I knew he was not driving, so I was uneasy. I thought it might have been some of the other youngsters, but then they told me that Paul had been attacked, that it was a serious attack and that he was unlikely to live,” he said.

“It was pretty tense for the first few days, because, first of all, we went to Altnagelvin and we knew Paul had been resuscitated on several occasions, now we know it was a total of four, and they then needed a bed in the Royal.

“Then when they went through the first of the surgery we knew it was possibly a four-hour operation and we were sent for and brought to the theatre door an hour-and-a-half in and we assumed Paul had died. We were told some of the damage at that stage, and they gave a five-day lifespan for Paul. So that was a traumatic week, because we counted the days down and we wondered would it be, you know would it be the sixth day, the seventh day, and we then were two weeks later and we realised Paul would live.

“We didn’t know the extent of the damage at that time, but the surgery was pretty traumatic. The full frontal piece of his skull was removed to allow Paul’s brain to swell and then his stomach was cut from edge to edge to store the bone fragments from his head, but when it came to rebuild the side of his head, it was so badly shattered that it could not be rebuilt,” he said.

Asked what he thought the motivation for the attack may have been, Mr McAuley said: “This was a Catholic family that was attacked, because they were Catholics. There was no paramilitary links, there was nothing. This was sheer arrogance on the part of the scum who carried out the attack, and it was identified as a Catholic property, it was a barbecue of mixed nationalities and mixed religions.

“It just so happened that the core friends were ex-school friends who were all at a Catholic grammar school and they were attacked that evening. The UDA was implicated in the IMC Report, number 12, to date five years on the UDA has remained silent. They have not given a reason for their association if they were involved and have not offered to the police to help if they were not involved. So, yeah, the UDA could contribute,” he said.

Information

Mr McAuley said the police receiving information which could lead to the arrest and prosecution of those responsible for the assault would help the family even though it would do nothing to improve Paul’s physical state.

“It would mean an awful lot. Paul has a life sentence lying on his back, blind, immobile. The people who did it are still walking the streets. It was a sectarian attack. It was clearly designed as a sectarian attack and accepted as such by Justice Harte in the trial; and when you have a murder gang, and they were a murder gang, because Paul was left for dead and they had to resuscitate him four times, then that gang is a threat to the rest of society. I think it has to be an embarrassment to the communities that protect them. These people demand integration and look for greater integration in the City and yet, in this case, in one of the most horrendous crimes in the City, they refuse absolutely to support the police by giving them information,” he said.

Focus

Asked how life had changed for the McAuley family in the last five years, he said: “Well, an attack like that changes everything. Your focus becomes Paul and the family revolve around Paul. There has been a fair amount of disruption, a fair amount of sadness, initially, a fair amount of anger, which melts in time when you accept, five years on, that this is Paul’s final condition, that there is no opportunity for improvement.”

He said it was “quite difficult” to see his son lying immobile, and knowing this would be how he would spend the rest of his days.

“It is not the Paul you knew. It is a different Paul. It is a Paul who cannot communicate. It is an image of the Paul that we knew at home. It is an immobile Paul, it is a Paul who cannot communicate. We basically have been left with a living image of Paul. The frustration is the fact that we have no communication with him, but the family spend a lot of time with him.

“You increase your level of acceptance with Paul’s state and I have spent a lot of time with Paul, and just aim to look for the best care for him and at present we are quite happy, because he is in the best place possible. He obviously needs 24-hour nursing care, so we cannot bring him home, so he is hospitalised for the rest of his days.”

Commenting on the renewed appeal for information by the police, he said the family was “quite optimistic” that it would produce results.

“We are quite optimistic now that we know the initial investigation never died, it was always live. We knew that there was a review, we feel there must have been some impetus for the review, and we are quite confident with the new DCI handling it, that there will be successful outcomes.

“I am sure the police will handle the information confidentially. There was the core of attackers, there are the supporters who transported them to the scene, there are the people who egged them on in the attack, there are the people who provided the facilities to clean up after, there are the people who concocted alibis to protect them, the people who destroyed evidence, so there are a lot of people associated with the crime, so I think people like that should come to the police’s door before the police go to their door.”