A barman who was beaten unconscious and left with devastating injuries outside a railway station has died. Leon Adams has passed away nearly 23 years after the attack which shocked Cardiff.
Leon’s family asked for privacy following his death on Boxing Day, confirming his funeral will take place on January 24. They plan to celebrate his life and they would welcome donations in his memory be made to Wales Air Ambulance.
The then 24 year-old barman was savagely beaten on his way home from work on Valentine’s Day 2002. You can get more story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here.
The injuries inflicted were so severe that Leon was in a coma for more than two years and left quadriplegic. Police believe that the motive behind the brutal attack was robbery but the perpetrators have never been brought to justice.
Barman Leon Adams was attacked in Cardiff
Leon had finished his shift at The Cottage pub on St Mary Street at about 11.30pm and was making his way home when he was assaulted. CCTV cameras filmed him walking down St Mary Street at about 2am but three hours later he was found unconscious outside Grangetown station with his £130 wages missing.
Despite numerous appeals, including a BBC Crimewatch reconstruction and a reward of £20,000, his attackers have never been caught. In the years that followed Leon, who lived in a care home, made remarkable progress.
When his mother Angela Main spoke to Wales Online over the years she said Leon, who lived in a care home near Swansea and was wheelchair bound after the attack, made the most of every opportunity he was given. With the help of a specialist machine, he had even asked his family whether detectives had found his attackers.
“He still cannot speak but he’s got a machine he types into to communicate with and that enables him to ask and provide some quite complex questions and answers,” Angela said in 2013, “Lately he’s been asking ‘have they caught the people who did this yet’ which is fantastic because it’s a thought process entirely of his own.”
Speaking about her son four years later in 2017 she said: “Physically he moves very little, but that doesn’t stop him getting on and living life. He is living a very active life – he gets involved in all kinds of things.”
She said that during the winter he enjoyed going to the cinema and enjoyed plans for surfing in warmer months. She said Leon struggled to remember his trauma but described him as a funny and open man.
Leon tried to make the best of life after the attack and was able to laugh and have a joke with his family, his mother said. He also survived pneumonia and a lung infection in 2013 that almost took his life.
Leon Adams
Paul Fenton the detective who worked on the case, stayed in contact with Leon and his family. Speaking in 2013 detective Detective Fenton, who cracked some of Cardiff’s biggest crimes during his 30 years of service, including the murder of Fairwater shipping clerk Geraldine Palk, and the Tylorstown double murder of Louise L’Homme and her nine-month-old baby daughter Tia – still believed witnesses may yet come forward when interviewed in 2013.
He said at that time: “From the inquiries we did at the time and the subsequent house to house inquiries we carried out, there was a suggestion that the answers to this horrendous attack lie very close to the scene. After the robbery took place, police believed the robbers went somewhere close and that they then spoke about it with people close to them.
“We apprehended two people but we lacked the evidence to bring any charges against them. At the time we treated it like a murder case because it was just as big – at the time we thought he was going to die.
“I’d love to see the case solved. It’s the one that hangs over me more than any other.”
Over the years Angela said dealing with the trauma of her son’s attack had changed her but made her stronger. She said that although Leon lived his own life in the care home she visited him most weeks.
She said that while she didn’t hate or think about her son’s attackers she hoped they had remembered what they had done: “The police have been brilliant – however, until someone has the courage to come forward we are where we are,” she said in 2017.
“Hopefully one day somebody will tell the truth; the people who did this, who witnessed it, they aren’t young any more. They have to live knowing that they have never told the truth.”
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