Stay-at-home dad Lorne Eldridge hadn’t been out for an evening in over two years — since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — when he finally decided to join some friends for a birthday dinner a few weeks ago.
Eldridge, 30, and his friend Zach Evans were heading home from the Oct. 14 celebration when they stopped at the Jacklin Road Esso station in Langford for gas. They saw a group of youths in the middle of the street and wondered what was up.
They simply asked them what was going on, and with that, the group attacked, Eldridge said.
“That was literally all that was said and then they came at us,” he said. “We just happened to be in their path.”
He saw someone with a knife coming at Evans and stepped in, and was stabbed himself in the right side of the chest, hit in the neck with a police baton, choked and kicked. He is now recovering at home after suffering a punctured lung — in pain and barely able to dress himself.
Evans, meanwhile, was punched a number of times and thrown into a bush, emerging with bruises and scrapes.
West Shore RCMP were already on their way to the area after a call about youths causing a disturbance at the nearby 7-Eleven, so they arrived soon after, Eldridge said.
Two youths were arrested in connection with the incident.
Last Friday, there was another stabbing in the same general area during a youth-on-youth fight on the Galloping Goose Trail. Two youths were arrested there, as well, and it turned out that some of the youths at the scene were also present at the Oct. 14 gas-station stabbing.
Eldridge said life since the stabbing has been difficult. He and partner Kaitlin Oyler have four young children — twin four-year-old boys, a two-year-old boy and an eight-month-old girl — and he said it’s lucky that Oyler is on maternity leave and can handle all of their care needs.
“If she wasn’t on maternity leave, she would have to be physically off work,” Eldridge said. “The first week and a half I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t put on my socks.”
Oyler has been a “trooper,” he said, describing himself as like a “fifth child,” unable to do much of anything.
He has been healing but the pain is still “brutal,” he said Wednesday.
“I’m OK to stand and sit, but it’s the full moving and any bend to my torso that hurts,” Eldridge said. “What this has done to me and my family is a joke.”
Evans has created an online fundraising page for Eldridge to cover expenses and ease the family’s stress.
Finances are already tight, said Eldridge, without added expenses like travelling to the hospital every two days for X-rays. He has also had to go to optometrist appointments to get his glasses fixed after they were broken in the attack.
The fundraising effort has generated close to $4,000 of the $8,500 goal and has been “a huge help,” Eldridge said.
The online fundraising page is at gofundme.com/f/helping-lorne-and-family-after-stabbing.
