On this day (December 30) in 1999, a mentally unstable man broke into George and Olivia Harrison’s Friar Park home in Oxfordshire, England. The former Beatle was stabbed multiple times and could have been killed. Fortunately, Mrs. Harrison acted quickly to subdue the attacker, likely saving her husband’s life.
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The Harrisons and Olivia’s mother were upstairs asleep in the early hours of December 30 when glass shattered downstairs. The intruder, 33-year-old Michael Abram, threw a piece of a statue of Saint Michael through a ground-floor window and came inside. While Mrs. Harrison wanted to lock the bedroom door and hide, the former Beatle felt that he needed to confront the intruder to keep his family safe.
Olivia Harrison Saved George’s Life
Abram stood on the mansion’s ground floor, a knife in one hand and the statue of Saint Michael’s spear in the other, screaming for Harrison to come down and face him. “He just tore up the stairs. He was in a florid psychotic state, and he was tall and young. He’d come closer to where the room was,” Olivia recalled. “This man was on top of George, trying to kill him. Just laying on him. The worst way to have some physical contact with some horrible person.”
Seeing her husband in danger, Mrs. Harrison went into the bedroom and grabbed a fireplace poker. She recalled her dad, a longtime baseball fan, giving her batting advice as a child. “He used to always say, ‘Follow through.’ That’s all I could think of,” she recalled. She hit the assailant several times with the poker, splitting his scalp and spilling his blood. However, it wasn’t enough to subdue him.
He got off of the former Beatle and turned his attention ot the poker-wielding woman. “He got up and chased me and had me around the neck. Then George got up and jumped on his back,” she said. Finally, Harrison was able to pin and disarm the assailant. The police arrived within minutes to arrest Abram. However, the ordeal wasn’t over. Harrison had received multiple stabwounds and needed medical attention.
The Harrisons Go to the Hospital
Paramedics were able to stop George Harrison’s bleeding. However, he needed more medical attention. As a result, first responders sent the couple to a nearby hospital. There, the former Beatle was treated for a collapsed lung.
“While no stab wound to the chest is minor, because there’s no way of carrying out an incident like that without the potential for serious injury, in Mr. Harrison’s case, it has not been particularly serious,” a doctor familiar with the case said during a press conference.
According to Ultimate Classic Rock, the home invasion wasn’t a burglary gone wrong. Instead, Abram believed that the Beatles were witches. Moreover, he believed that Harrison possessed him and that he was on a mission from God to kill the former Beatle.
Featured Image by Tom Wargacki Archive/Getty Images
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