An 18-year-old youth was recovering in hospital last night after a gang of armed and masked men burst into his home and inflicted a paramilitary-style beating.
Mr Declan Grimes was at his home in the Muirhevnamor estate in Dundalk just before midnight on Tuesday evening when eight men entered the house and assaulted him with baseball bats and sledgehammers.
Mr Grimes defended himself using shelving from a television unit and escaped without any broken bones, but the severity of the beating could be seen in the blood spattered across walls in the kitchen of the Grimes home.
The teenager's mother, Ms Jacinta Grimes, was upstairs in the house when the gang burst in.
"I tried to get into the kitchen to help Declan, but there were so many of them wearing balaclavas I couldn't even get in the door," she said.
Another local youth who had been in the house with her son was dragged outside by one of the gang.
"I didn't know what to do, I didn't even think about calling the guards straight away. All I could think about was getting in to my son. There wasn't even a sound from him, which made me even more worried. I thought he was dead."
Ms Grimes's other son, Aaron (16), was also in the kitchen at the time of the beating and was injured. But the gang were intent only on getting to her eldest son, she says.
"He got a letter in the post a few weeks ago threatening his life, which we passed on to the gardaí," she explained.
Ms Grimes said she knew her son was "no angel. . .but no one deserves this." Detectives from Dundalk Garda station arrived at the scene yesterday, and have launched an investigation of the incident.