18-year-old Gabrielle Walsh was punched during a night out after she told a man who was following her that she wasn’t interested.
The teen was approached by the man with his two other friends when she was out with a friend in central Manchester.
When the two teens walked away from the men, they started following them and tried to talk to them.
Gabrielle then told them: “I’m sorry, I’m not interested.”
However, her words started a row which led to one of the men becoming violent.
“They kept harassing us. I was saying to [my friend] Kyle: ‘Let’s go’. Then he hit me – he fully knocked me out,” Gabrielle said.
“When I woke up I was on the floor and the three of them had jumped on Kyle as well.”
Volunteers from the Village Angels community safety group helped the pair.
“They tried to get me an ambulance but they said it was a two-hour wait so I just got a taxi to hospital,” she expressed.
“They didn’t do much, they basically just gave me some eye drops and told me to go home.
“I went back to the eye hospital today and they said I’ve got a blood clot on my eye. It still can’t really see out of it, when I open my eye all I see is yellow.”
Gabrielle said that the incident had left her scared of going out on her own. “Girls feel like they can’t say “no”. They feel like if they say no then they might hurt you and in this case it was true.
“It’s scared me, I’m scared to go out, I’ve always got to be with somebody.”
Councillor Pat Karney said he would see if officials can help identify the man through CCTV. “I am horrified to hear about this horrific attack. We will check our CCTV system to see if we can identify the attacker.”
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