A New Lodge mother of six has insisted she will not be forced from her home after a gang of eight men brutally assaulted her and her father in a weekend attack.
Catriona Arbuckle suffered a hairline fracture to her cheek, multiple facial injuries and lost eight teeth when she was attacked outside her Meadow Place house at around 1am on Sunday morning. Her 59-year-old father who intervened in the attack, was rushed to hospital in an ambulance where he is still being treated for a collapsed lung and two broken ribs.
Catriona said that the family had been celebrating one of her children’s eighth birthday party earlier in the evening. Later that night she had stepped outside her house to have a cigarette.
She said a bottle was flung at her by a group of around eight men she believed to be in their twenties as they walked up the street. After a verbal confrontation, one of the men approached her and viciously assaulted her. Catriona’s six children ranging from 14 to one and a half were sleeping at the time but her father heard the commotion and came to her aid. Upon doing so, he was set on by the rest of the gang. Neighbours were forced to call an ambulance and the police.
“They beat the life out of me,” she said. “Then they beat my father into the ground. The way they beat a 59 year old man was disgusting.
“They beat him so much that he swallowed his tongue and stopped breathing. I thought he was dead.”
Catriona said that she has named her attackers to police and will not be intimidated from her home.
“No one is going to put me out of my own home,” she said.
“Hopefully they lock these scumbags up and throw away the key.”
Police confirmed that they were called to the report of an assault in the Spamount Street area of the New Lodge where a man and a woman were reported to have been attacked by a group of men in the street.
A PSNI spokesperson said the man and woman were treated in hospital for non-life threatening injuries and appealed for anyone with any information to contact police in Tennent Street on 101.
