Men high-fived moments after leaving victim partially blind in attack

Two men high-fived after attacking two sleeping people in their house, leaving one blind in one eye and the other in a vegetative state.

Jamie Elston, 32, and David Ratcliffe, 33, set upon Christopher Whineary and Ashley McKenna on New Year’s Day in 2021 at their Workington, Cumbria, home.

The pair were captured on CCTV smashing through the front door at around 3:30am after consuming alcohol and cocaine.

Brendan Burke, prosecuting, told Carlisle Crown Court that the motive behind the attack isn’t clear – other than their ‘demonstrably fragile sense of masculinity’.

‘Little is known about the purpose of the attack, save to say that each victim had previously been in a relationship with the previous partners of the defendants,’ he said, according to the Cumbrian newspaper, the News & Star.

‘The best the Crown can do is to suggest that this attack arose out of some perceived offence to the demonstrably fragile sense of masculinity of the defendants.’

Christopher and Ashley had spent New Year’s Eve at home together, texting their children before falling asleep in the living room.

Then they woke up to see the defendants looming over them.

Elston was heard telling Ratcliffe: ‘Go get a knife; we might as well kill them now.’

Having smashed a vacuum cleaner between the two men, the defendants then used a hammer to shatter the victims’ mobile phones.

Ratcliffe, the court heard, then kicked and punched one of the men while saying, ‘You shouldn’t have went near her’, as Elston set upon the other victim.

All Christopher could think about between blows, he later said, was that they ‘were going to kill us’.

‘Both defendants were kicking the victims to the head and body. (One of the victims) tried to defend himself but was unable to get off his position on the sofa, such was the ferocity of the attack,’ Burke said.

Ratcliffe, after Elston warned against the battered and bruised victims reporting the incident to police, then broke a coffee table and tugged out a ceiling light.

The beating resumed, with one of the victims passing out.

It would take hours for the badly injured Christopher and Ashley to be taken to the hospital.

Concerned neighbours found in the blood-splattered room one victim lying face down over an armchair out cold, while his friend was face up on the sofa.

Christopher suffered a fractured nose, a cut above his left eyebrow, multiple cuts inside his mouth and a swollen face. He is now permanently blind in one eye.

Ashley was airlifted to Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary and placed on life support. He experienced a brain injury so severe he is now bedbound.

Being fed by tube, Ashley can no longer walk some 15 months after the attack – he can only manage to squeeze his loved one’s hands or blink to hold a conversation, the court heard.

Judge Ian Unsworth KC said the men ‘engaged in horrific and sustained violence’.

Speaking about the shocking CCTV footage, he said: ‘Knowing what you had done, in a quite breath-taking, chilling and sickening image, you could be seen hugging and congratulating each other, in high spirits, your brutal work done.

‘You evinced pleasure from the pain and suffering you had inflicted’.

Elston, of Iredale Crescent, and Ratcliffe, of Falcon Place, both Workington, were each jailed for 21 years and seven months.

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