EXCLUSIVE: Eoin Campbell was so badly injured in the incident that he lost €6,000 in earnings
Eoin Campbell(Image: Handout)
This Irish hero today describes how he fought to save a woman from murder – and his bravery has 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.
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.
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.
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.
Eoin Campbell, who works at a university in France, is originally from Co Down(Image: Handout)
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.”
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.
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.”
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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.
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.”
Mr Campbell immediately ran to help. He says: “I began running towards him.
“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.”
Mr Campbell, who played GAA and boxed as a youngster, says he knew he had to intervene physically to save the woman.
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.”
When asked if he believed the man was going to kill the woman, Mr Campbelll replies: “One hundred per cent.”
We then ask him how many times he punched the attacker, and he says: “I’d say maybe seven or eight.
“The second last punch, I hurt him. I could see that it was like an electric shock that went through his face. With that last shot, he released her and we had to hold him on the ground.
“He was screaming all sorts of stuff about earthquakes and the end of the world. It was all fairly rambling stuff.
“We pinned him on the ground. The young lady got up. She was crying her eyes out. We had him in a crucifix position on the ground. He was thrashing around and I had my knee on his chest. She called the cops.”
He says the police arrived quickly – and he did not realise why until the following morning.
Mr Campbell says: “He had already attacked, I think, five women that night. He was on a rampage and they were already in the neighbourhood looking for him.”
French cops quickly arrested the attacker.(Image: Police Nationale/Facebook)
One of the other women he attacked was a lady in her seventies – and spent time in a coma because of the injuries he inflicted on her.
Mr Campbell also says he injured his hand when punching the attacker, who was later detained in a secure mental health facility.
He says: “I hurt myself with the last punch. I was aiming for his cheekbone, but the way his head moved, that meant I slightly missed and I caught him with the lower part of the hand.”
The academic says he did not immediately realise how badly his hand was injured.
He says: “I never went to a doctor straight away, which was a mistake.
“I didn’t get my hand seen to until the new year. My hand was swollen initially, and I didn’t think it was that big a deal.
“I would have had injuries when I was boxing or playing GAA. I mostly played GAA as a kid and as an adult, so you always have swells and it didn’t feel that different at the time.
“Then the swelling went down, and the hand was a mess. The movement was off, and it looked out of place.
“I was home at Christmas, and the family said, ‘The state of your hand, you need to get that sorted out.’ It was starting to feel more and more sore.”
He went back to Lyon in January 2023 and after several visits to medics, it was established he had ruptured tendons in his dominant right hand.
That meant he could still teach, but he would not be able to mark exams at the end of the semester. He told work and they said he should get signed off – which he did for two months.
He says: “I had to take two months off and that brought me into the summer time. In those two months, normally I would be doing additional work. I was missing out on my summer extras. I was missing out on my overtime work.
“And there would be a series of interviews you would do for incoming students, which is all overtime because it is out of semester. That’s where I started to lose money.”
He says he is down about €6,000 from his injury, including having to repeat a course on data protection he was taking at the time of the incident, as well as losing extra hours teaching in another college.
He also says he could not drive and had to take taxis – nor could he cook for months.
In September of this year, Mr Campbell took a court case to apply for compensation from the fond de garantie, a state fund for victims of crime.
The three person panel turned him down because he was not assaulted by the attacker he confronted.
He says: “When I took the case, I asked for the money I lost back. That’s what I asked for. This has cost me, and I was trying to get compensation for that.”
And he adds: “They’re saying under the legislation, I’m not owed anything, because I’m not a victim. I wasn’t attacked. He didn’t attack me. And in my police statement, I was fairly blunt about that, I said ‘look, he didn’t attack me. He never tried to hit me’.
Université Catholique de Lyon, where Mr Campbell has worked since 2008.(Image: Université Catholique de Lyon/Facebook)
“They’re using that to say, ‘Look, you’re not a victim’. I was morally obliged to help that young lady, and I got hurt doing it.
“All I’m saying is the state should protect me as well. I protected that young lady, and I want the state to protect me. I shouldn’t have to take that sort of financial hit.”
He also says he has no regrets about intervening. Mr Campbell says: “I can’t regret it. I know I should probably be proud of it, but I can’t.
“The incident itself was just so disgusting that you can never look back on that and feel good about it. You can’t. It was just horrible. And you see a woman that young and he just demolished her.
“The way he took her to the ground, I can only feel disgusted about the incident. Trying to take some sort of pride out of the incident, it just doesn’t work. I just can’t feel it.”
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