Dad blinded after attack on night out calls for glass ban in bars

Yorkshire Evening Post

A dad-of-two blinded in an unprovoked attack on a night out has called for glass bottles and drinks containers to be banned in bars after 9pm.  Matthew Syron, 32, was glassed by stranger Gareth Dean, 37, during a night out in Revolución de Cuba in Leeds, West Yorks,. with a group of friends.

Transcript

00:00 My name is Matthew Siren. I was involved in a glassing attack on Boxing Day evening in

00:07 Leeds. What led up to the incident was I was glassed from behind, instantly blinded. I

00:17 was then rushed to hospital, which I underwent five hours of surgery to save both my eyes

00:27 from bleeding and the infection, which 30 stitches in the right eye, 10 in the left,

00:34 and all my face stitched up, my lips, my eyebrows, nose. What led up to that was five weeks in

00:40 hospital. I've undergone another surgery to save the right eye. The left eye can't be

00:45 saved for the next nine to 12 months. It'll be sewn up internally, and I'll be looking

00:51 at getting a transplant in a year's time of the cornea in the left eye to hopefully get

00:55 some sort of sight. The right eye, the retina was detached. I've had that reattached, a

01:02 buckle put in place to squeeze the eye, keep it from moving as much. I'm going to be undergoing

01:09 several surgeries over the next couple of months.

01:16 What really do I want from this is obviously some sort of change to the laws. No one ever

01:24 gets ID'd, which definitely should be something that should come into play, so you instantly

01:30 know where that person is, where that person lives, if anything does kick off inside. The

01:34 glass to be removed from 9pm, just to serve plastic, just to prevent this from happening

01:41 to anyone else. Over 87,000 people a year get glassed. It's costing the country billions.

01:49 The GoFundMe's up to obviously raise money for me and my family. As I go back to Australia,

01:56 there's no free healthcare. I have my own healthcare, but you can't ever pay up to 100%,

02:02 so they make sure that you have to always pay something, which is surgeries, meeting

02:08 specialists cost thousands and thousands of dollars. I know that a cornea transplant,

02:14 just to look into up near 60,000, so if I was to get that done in Australia, we're talking

02:20 thousands and thousands of dollars over the years.

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