The GAA player shot and beaten in Huddersfield has revealed the details of the attack.
Ferghal Cross, 22, from Enniskillen in Co. Fermanagh said he was walking alone through the town centre in the early hours of April 28 when he was assaulted.
Mr Cross had been returning from a night out with friends when he was set upon less than a mile from home.
“I’d been out drinking with the boys I live with when I went to get a takeaway,” he said. “I remember a car pulling up, I don’t know which direction it came from, then shots being fired. The next thing I remember is waking up in Leeds General infirmary. I don’t know if I hit my head on a paving slab or whether I was hit with a weapon. I don’t think it was a weapon.”
The design student at Huddersfield University also described the injuries he sustained.
“I fractured my skull and had bleeding on my brain, he said. "I perforated my ear in the attack so there was blood coming from it.”
Mr Cross said he had four pellet marks on his neck and chest from an air-compressed gun but more worrying was the fact he suffered temporary memory loss.
“When I came around in the hospital I didn’t even recognise the boys I live with who had come to visit me. They told me my mum was coming but I didn’t really believe them as she lives in Northern Ireland. I still wasn’t aware of where I was a few days after that,” he added.
The student says he is not bitter about what happened but wants an explanation.
“I think it is random. It is nothing I have done,” he said.
And he is confident about making a full recovery.
“I am lucky as I am young and relatively fit but if that had been someone with existing health problems, then the outcome would have been a different one,” he told the Huddersfield Examiner.
“I will be put on painkillers for quite a while and have an appointment next week for my ear as my hearing is obviously affected.”
Police confirmed a 31-year-old man and a 16-year-old youth remain on bail in connection with the attack.
