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As I went through that doorway, he was hiding on the right side, he buried the hammer right above my right eye

“I went to get up for some reason, I was shaking my head, and he was on me. He grabbed me by the back of the scruff and he just started lambasting the back of my head,” Hearn said. “He opened up the back of my head like a pumpkin… My brains are all over my walls.”

“He tells me to lie down on my stomach on my hands, right? And I’m thinking, okay, he’s gonna give me the death blow. I almost did it. I was in shock. I was bleeding to death,” Hearn said. “I heard the voice of God tell me, grab that hammer in your hands and don’t let go. So that’s what I did, and he pulled me to my feet, he got scared, right, he pulled me up cuz I had the hammer handle in my hand, and he had his hands on either edge of it, right?”

On his feet, Hearn started to flail punches with his freshly broken arms and mangled fingers.

“The moon come through the window, and I seen who it was, I seen his curly hair and his baseball hat,” Hearn said. “I see in the moonlight, it’s Brian Riches.”

The moon come through the window, and I seen who it was, I seen his curly hair and his baseball hat

By the time the attack ended, when Hearn escaped out the front door, he had brain trauma, a fractured jaw and skull, two broken arms, blood loss and organ damage. He had taken something like three dozen hammer blows.

Brian James Riches, then aged 24, who was also known as Brian John Spinks, was drunk and high that night, in violation of release conditions. This was consistent with his “deeply entrenched criminal values and attitudes,” as noted by the Parole Board of Canada the year before, when he was first released from a prison sentence for a series of gratuitously violent armed robberies.