A York mum has told of the terrifying moment when a gang of men armed with machetes and baseball bats smashed up a neighbouring flat and attacked a woman.
The shocking spree of violence left her five-year-old child terrified and too scared to stay in his home overnight.
Police are now investigating the raid off Burton Stone Lane and have made three arrests. They say it was a shocking incident but they believe it was isolated.
Peace in the block of flats was shattered at about 6.30pm last night (Monday), just after Christina Evans had put her son to bed.
“I heard a bang – and it echoes in there,” she told YorkMix. “I thought somebody’s fallen downstairs.
“And all these men came in, with machetes, there were baseball bats, metal bars – all masked up, there’s about ten of them.”
She said one of them looked directly at her – and she rushed back upstairs to her flat, helping her heavily pregnant neighbour as she did so and telling her: “Lock your door.”
Christina said the men attacked one of the flats, which she said was a base for county lines drug dealing.
“They smashed the full lot up.”
She called police. “I have asthma. I had a panic attack, passed out and broke my door handle.”
The police response was good, she said – they arrived within eight minutes armed with a taser. But the gang had already fled in a van.
All the top floor flats are home to children. One was sick with “through panic and being scared”.
One of the occupants of the targeted flat, a woman, came out and was bleeding. “They’d cut her a bit, roughed her up a bit,” Christina said.
“It’s all taped off by the police now and the police in there watching crime scene obviously. But this keeps on going on all the time.”
She described it as a terrifying experience.
“Honest to God. I’ve seen some stuff in my life. I worked behind bars for 12 years.
“This – you might as well move to the New York Bronx. That’s how bad it is.”
Christina fears for what might happen next. “What will it be? A petrol bomb? A gun shoot out?”
She claims the drug dealing has been going on at the flat for over a year, but no one has done anything about it.
“We can’t live like this anymore,” she said.
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