“Please call me, it’s urgent. My car got petrol bombed.”
Philip English wrote that message at 4.17am on Friday September 18th as dawn was breaking.
He sent it to me. He was frightened. He was worried for his children.
Long shadows appeared as he looked at his badly damaged car.
The culprits had disappeared into the shadows, but they’d be back.
04:17 Friday September 18th – less than a month ago – Philip texted me: “Hi Damien please call me it’s urgent. My car got petrol bombed.”
I rang him that morning. He spoke about what had happened; how the car was destroyed; how worried he was, especially for his children.
“It could have fully caught fire and could’ve burned the house down,” he said.
Philip said he was going to meet the Guards, that he’d keep in touch.
The following Monday Gardai appealed for information on Garda Watch on WLR.
That’s what we know but there is so much we don’t know.
How extensive were the Garda investigations after that attack?
Did they link it to a ‘paint attack’ on family car in August 2023?
Did they question anyone? Had they suspects?
What did they tell Philip and his wife Kim?
Less than four weeks later, around 5am on Tuesday October 13th, at least one person used the shadows and attacked Philip’s house.
Philip and Kim were asleep upstairs in their well-kept, three-bedroomed semi-d in the Birchwood estate in Waterford city.
They were very happily married couple – they loved each other immensely.
I know that because I knew Philip.
He contacted me a few years ago about a deeply personal story from his childhood and I put him in touch with a close friend of mine. He helped him.
Philip was a big, wonderful man who had been through a lot.
He had relationships in the past and had grown up children.
Since he met Kim they were madly in love and had four wonderful children….Callum, Jayden, Nadia and Elliot.
Philip worked hard, in security and other jobs, was never involved in drugs and did his utter best to raise their children. They loved them back intensely.
Nadia has leukaemia and they were up and down to Crumlin children’s hospital the past few years and they needed a specially adopted car as Jayden had heart issues.
They did everything for their children.
Three years ago, in August 2023, they invited me into their home after someone had thrown paint on the car in the front driveway.
It’s understood Philip might have been trying to help out someone he knew in relation to a debt owed to another person.
They never found out who did it and things became quieter – until Friday September the 18th – and that text at seventeen minutes past four in the morning:
“Hi Damien Please call me it’s urgent. My car got petrol bombed. Philip English.”
He hadn’t used Whatsapp and would sometimes text his name in case people mightn’t still have his number.
There were no texts on October the 13th.
Had there been threats? Social media posts indicate something was being threatened.
As they slept, their car was set on fire.
And then the glass panel at the front door was smashed.
A type of petrol bomb was thrown in. It exploded, fuel splashing everywhere, the stairs catching fire immediately.
The house quickly filling with thick black smoke.
They woke. They couldn’t get down the stairs.
The flames and smoke woke the neighbours. They couldn’t get in the front.
Philip broke glass windows at the back of the house. Screams for help echoed around the estate. Horror.
Neighbours tried everything. They shouted up at him to get the children and throw them out the window and they’d catch them.
He turned around to get them.
He never came back.
