This Irish hero has today spoken of how he battled to save a woman from being murdered – and his courageous actions have left him thousands of euro out of pocket.
“I had to give him a terrible beating. He just wouldn’t let go. He was killing her,” lawyer and academic Eoin Campbell tells us of the moment he landed a barrage of punches on a man who was strangling a woman on a French street, reports The Mirror.
He also reveals he lost €6,000 in earnings over an injury sustained as he fought for the woman’s life – and that French authorities have snubbed his compensation plea.
“The matter put me in the red, and I think that the state should take me back to the black,” he says, reports The Mirror.
Mr Campbell, 43, was speaking to us after a recent decision by a French state body to refuse him compensation for his ordeal in November 2022.
He intervened to save the woman from certain death near the French city of Lyon – an incident that turned the university lecturer into a local hero, reports The Mirror.
But he suffered a serious injury to his dominant right hand as he punched the attacker up to eight times – and that meant he was out of work for months and also lost thousands of euro in overtime and extra income.
But, despite applying to a national fund set up to compensate victims of crime, a panel turned him down. That decision, by a panel in recent weeks, appalled Mr Campbell, from Warrenpoint in Co Down, reports The Mirror.
Mr Campbell, who was a practising solicitor in Ireland before moving to Lyon in 2008, tells us he feels the French state should have made up losses he suffered when he saved the young woman’s life.
He says: “I want them to take me back to zero. I didn’t ask for a new Ferrari. I just said, ‘Look, this cost me. Here’s a reasonable estimate of what it cost, could I get that back?’ And they said no,” reports The Mirror.
Mr Campbell, who has worked as a data privacy officer and law lecturer at the city’s Université catholique de Lyon since 2008, tells us the horror incident happened as he was heading home early in November 2022.
He got off a tram in the city of Villeurbanne and was walking to his apartment about 400 metres away and took a shortcut through a car park – when he saw a man walking ahead of him, reports The Mirror.
He says: “He was walking the same direction as me, but he was over to my left and the front and there was this young woman approaching. She has come walking along, and I can see him heading straight for her.”
He adds: “He starts talking to her. I’m beginning to pay more and more attention because everything about this guy is weird. He doesn’t look right,” reports The Mirror.
Police reports later said he was wearing a flowing robe, but had no trousers, jacket or shoes on – even though it was November.
Mr Campbell says what happened next made him and a Croatian passerby leap into action to save the woman, reports The Mirror.
He says: “He’s talking to her. He’s quite close to her, and she seems quite intimidated by him. And then he grabbed her around the shoulders. I shouted over to her, ‘Madame, do you know that man?’ And just as she’s saying ‘no’, he smacks her. It was an open hand, but with real power. He hit her hard, awful hard. And then he started strangling her with bare hands. And by the time I got there I heard another fellow shouting, this Croat boy. He was entering the car park from the other side. We went running over together. But by the time we got there, your man’s around the back of her, and he’s strangling her out with his forearms.”
He says: “He was killing her. He was choking her. If you had been holding a gun to his head rather than trying to hit him, you would have had to pull the trigger. There was no fear there. The eyes were gone. You couldn’t negotiate with him. You couldn’t reason with him. He was trying to kill her. I boxed as a teenager, and I still hit a punch bag, so my first thought would be to punch him, but I couldn’t get near him, just the way she was. We’re trying to wrestle his arms off her. And then he leaps backwards and he brings her down on top of him. We dropped on top of him, I am screaming at him (in French) ‘Let her go, let her go.’ We are trying to wrestle his arms off because her face, at this point her face is still right in front of him, it’s almost impossible to reach him. Then the Croat man managed to wrestle one of the arms off, and basically he just pinned this one arm. That revealed the side of his face. And from there, I was able to lean over and I battered him. I had to give him a terrible beating because he wouldn’t let go. He just wouldn’t let go,” reports Breaking News.
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