PAUL Fearon’s mother spent four days in hospital being treated after his brutal attack.

During the drink-fuelled assault in Wigton – which was entirely unprovoked – Wendy Fearon feared her 41-year-old Army veteran son would kill her. She suffered four fractured ribs and a punctured lung, from which blood had to be drained.

In her victim statement, she said she was even now in pain from her injuries, which were complicated by repeated lung infections, which left her breathless.

She still struggles to get up the stairs, she said.

“I find it difficult to lift objects with [the injured] side of my body, which as I work as a cleaner makes life difficult,” she said. She had to take 12 weeks off work, unpaid.

She continued: “My mental health has been the most affected. Since the incident, I have not been settled in my own home. We had the locks changed and I lock the doors at night.

"I am scared he will come back.

“I speak to my neighbours when they’re at my door and I feel uncomfortable even when going into my garden. I struggle with my sleep.”

As a mother, she said, it was difficult to process what had happened. “I don’t want to see him again, which is difficult for any mother to say,” she continued. “I feel that if I see him again I will be scared in the same way that I was during the incident.”

As he jailed Fearon for six years, Judge Guy Mathieson said the defendant had taken out his frustration and anger on his mother.

The judge suggested that, in the mind of the defendant - said to have been traumatised by his Army service - he was not hitting his mother but she was the one who bore the brunt of his anger.

It was unclear Wendy Fearon's mental scars would heal, said the judge.

“It takes a lot for a mother to disengage from her child and say ‘I can’t help him anymore.’ She was now afraid of Fearon, her son. The judge added: “That is the saddest aspect of this case – that that relationship is fractured.

“Whether it will ever heal or not, I don’t know.”

Nobody knew better than Fearon what his mother had meant to him, and how she had supported him. Ruling that the non-contact restraining order would be indefinite, the judge added: “You leave her to heal.