A man whose ear was chewed off by the Liverpool parade attacker has explained the details of the bizarre altercation.
Paul Doyle, 54, was jailed for 21-and-a-half years on Tuesday for ramming his car into families and children celebrating Liverpool’s Premier League win last summer.
The trial revealed the Croxteth father-of-three had a violent past – including bar brawls and a gruesome ear-biting incident at a motorway service station.
Stuart Lucas, a former Royal Navy reservist, revealed how Doyle sank his teeth into his ear moments after ‘fly kicking’ two younger servicemen.
Recalling the 1994 incident at Charnock Richard services, Lancashire, Lucas told the Mail: ‘It was so painful I let go and then when I did let him go, he bit through it, chewed it up and spat it out.’
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Doyle was one of two marines on a bus with 28 sailors travelling to Barry, South Wales, to join HMS Dovey for a journey to Glasgow, according to the newspaper.
During a motorway stop-over, he reportedly witnessed Doyle, then 23, ‘doing a flying kick which laid two of the lads out’.
Being a killick, otherwise known as leading hand, a leadership role in the Navy, Lucas said he felt obliged to step in.
The now 68-year-old reportedly put Doyle in a ‘bear hug, strapping his arms to his sides’ causing them to fall to the floor.
Lucas said ‘I still had him in a bear hug which was good, everything seemed to be going well and he couldn’t move apart from swearing.
‘But he could move his head and at that he promptly sunk his teeth into my ear and said, ‘let go’.’
The father-of-one, from East Lothian, Scotland, said the technique is called a ‘biter’ in Liverpool but says Doyle ‘could have done it without biting through’.
With blood gushing from his ear, Lucas and his colleagues scrabbled around on the floor, finally locating the chunk of ear which they put in a bag and brought to hospital.
He said he was discharged but was later told at a Glasgow hospital, where medics unwrapped the bandage, that there was no way to reattach the chunk.
In November 1994, Doyle was jailed for 12 months for causing grievous bodily harm over the incident.
Doyle appears to have stayed out of trouble after his release from prison in 1995.
But that all changed on Monday, May 26, when he drove his Ford Galaxy people carrier into crowds of pedestrians.
The terrifying attack left 134 people injured, according to the Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner.
Details of Doyle’s previous offences came to light at his sentencing hearing at Liverpool Crown Court for the parade ramming.
It emerged that Doyle had what he described as a ‘scuffle’ in a nightclub in 1991.
He had just finished a 32-week training period at the Commando Training Centre in Lympstone, Devon.
Doyle was thrown out of the venue, and then punched another person in the face several times.
He was convicted of a section 20 assault and fined by Exeter Magistrates’ Court.
Soon after, in February 1992, he was convicted of two military offences.
One was for using violence to a superior officer and one of conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.
In July that year, he was also convicted of a military offence equivalent to criminal damage.
Doyle served in the military for four years, starting with the Royal Engineers and later enlisted with the Marines in 1991, but never saw active service, the court heard.
He was ‘discharged with services no longer required’ in 1993, 22 months after enlisting, the court heard.
He was said to have tried and failed to challenge the discharge.
In the following decades, Doyle seemed to be a reformed criminal success story, studying maths and psychology at the University of Liverpool and building a successful IT career.
Companies House records also indicate that Doyle started a business selling baseball caps.
Paul Greaney KC, the case’s prosecutor said: ‘Those efforts to rehabilitate himself after a difficult early adulthood only serve to make more shocking, and tragic, what he did in Liverpool that day this May.’
The court heard Doyle took months to accept the reality of his shocking parade attack.
His barrister, Simon Csoka KC, said: ‘The defendant wasn’t able immediately to reconcile the man that he has been for the last 30 years with the way he behaved on 26 May.
‘In the same way that nobody who knows him well could believe it; neither could he for some time.’
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