SEVEN years ago, Ellen Murphy's world was shattered when her boyfriend Jamie McKechnie was viciously assaulted in a single-punch attack.
The then 24-year-old was left fighting for his life in hospital, where doctors put him in an induced coma in a bid to reduce brain damage.
Jamie, from Lewisham, South East London, was on a night out in Bromley, Kent, on August 15, 2011 when a total stranger attacked him and left him unconscious, lying in a pool of his own blood.
Andrew Ellis had followed Jamie to the train station, which was situated at the bottom of a hill.
Approaching him at speed, he punched him in the back of the head and then ran off. The sickening assault was apparently motiveless.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun Online, Ellen revealed: "He was on his way home and I got a call from one of his friends.
He just said ‘Jamie’s been attacked, we don’t know if he’s conscious or not, he’s lying on the floor, there’s blood everywhere’. I was obviously horrified.
"I said ‘is he dead?’ And he said ‘I don’t know’."
Jamie was taken to King's College Hospital, in South East London, where doctors revealed he had suffered a brain injury.
Ellen said: "Doctors told us that even when they weaned him off all the drugs, he might not wake up. So it just became a case of waiting and hoping for the best.
"There was no response, then after about three or four weeks he started opening his eyes.
"But he was dead behind the eyes, there was no recognition, it was just a physical action."
Jamie, who almost died when he caught septicaemia in hospital, spent three months in King's before being moved to the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney, South West London.
Ellen revealed: "I think a lot of people didn’t even expect Jamie to get out of there, but he did."
While Jamie was in hospital Ellen, who's a soul singer known as Only Girl, used music to try and stir a reaction from him.
She released a music video about Jamie's story, called Mountain, earlier this month.
She recalled: "Music is something I leaned on a lot. I would put the headphones in his ear and see if I got any reaction.
"I thought maybe it would stir something deep within his brain.
"When he was first in hospital, I was so devastated I stopped doing music completely.
"It was only when he started talking again six months later that I started writing again.
"I would go into the rehab hospital and they had a big piano there and I would play to him.
"There was one really funny instance when we put the radio on, and he’d only just started talking, and it was Annie Lennox, Who’s That Girl? and he started singing along to it.
"He could barely talk at the time, and he remembered the lyrics to this Annie Lennox song.
"It’s something familiar when Jamie must have been waking up in this world that he doesn’t recognise."
Just two days before Christmas 2011, four months after the attack, Jamie spoke his first words.
Ellen said: "I told him ‘I really want you to talk to me before Christmas, that’s all I want’.
"At this point he was eating food and stuff, but he wasn’t talking. And then one day I said something and he just went ‘no’. I was crying and saying ‘what else can you say’?"
The couple had only been together for two years before Jamie's attack, but Ellen stuck by his side every day - and even proposed to him when he was recovering in Putney.
In September 2014, three years and one month after the attack, Jamie walked unaided for the first time since being hospitalised - to go down the aisle at his own wedding.
Ellen said: "It was amazing - everyone said ‘that’s the best wedding I’ve ever been to’. Because you could feel the love from everyone.
"A tragedy can either split you apart or bring you closer.
"It hit everyone just as hard, so the wedding was a great way to put that aside and be a normal couple for once, and not think about the brain injury or the disability, and live as we thought we would live before this happened."
Jamie, a keen BMXer, was discharged from hospital in 2012 - and now lives a relatively normal life, volunteering in a bike shop four days a week.
Ellen said: "The Jamie that existed before, that Jamie doesn’t exist anymore, that Jamie’s gone.
"As much as there’s a lot the same, he’s got the same sense of humour, it’s almost like the same Jamie but a different version.
"Because of the specific damage to that part of his brain, the muscles in his mouth have weakened.
"He’s very coherent but sometimes he has to repeat stuff because some of the words aren’t pronounced clearly enough.
"I think that’s very frustrating to him because he was always such a talker. He always had such a loud, cockney voice and now it must be frustrating for people to not understand you."
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Ellis was sentenced to three years in jail for the attack on Jamie, but he only served one year - while Jamie has a life sentence.
Ellen said: "The attack was very motiveless. There was no altercation, no fight, it was very strange. He only did one year in the end.
"You just have to accept that at least they caught him, and you hope it would be on his conscience.
"I don’t think he really understands what he did to Jamie, because it’s quite a hard thing to understand unless you met him and knew what he was like before, and realised what he’d taken away from him with that action.
"He’s got a criminal record, but he can live a normal life. I’m not a bitter, angry person but he needs to know what he’s done."
Ellen will be performing a special live version of Mountain, accompanied by a violin, cello and choir, at Thousand Island, London on Thursday May 3. Tickets can be bought here.
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