‘Acid attack was like blow torch on my leg’
● East Lothian victim breaks silence after being scarred by rival
A teenage schoolgirl permanently scarred after a love rival poured drain cleaner into her viola case has said the pain was like having a blow torch held to her leg.
Molly Young, 17, recalled how her tights “started to disintegrate” after she reached up to fetch the instrument from a shelf and the acid poured on to her right leg.
Molly was attacked by Emily Bowen, a fellow pupil at Knox Academy in Haddington, East Lothian, in September last year after Bowen discovered she was dating a former boyfriend. Bowen, 18, was sentenced to 21 months in prison.
Speaking publicly for the first time about her ordeal yesterday, Molly revealed she still cannot feel parts of her leg.
She said: “I came back to school from an appointment and I had music class, and one of my friends said to me ‘oh, you’d better go up and check your viola because I’ve just seen Emily in the string room’.
“I said ‘let’s go and see what’s happened’ and I got half way up the stairs and I turned to my friend – I had a really bad feeling – and said ‘would you be able to come with me?’
“We went upstairs together and as soon as we went into the room there was an eggy sort of smell. We just made a joke about it.
“I remember looking at my viola and shrugging my shoulders, and I was like ‘there’s nothing wrong with it’.
“I just took it off the shelf like I do three times a day, and my tights just started to disintegrate. [The liquid just] fell out the bottom.
“When I saw the holes in my tights I was like ‘what’s going on?’. It was like someone holding a blow torch to your leg.
“If you burn your hand on an 0 Emily Bowen was jailed for 21 months for acid attack oven you can take it away and run it under the cold tap and it’s fine. With that I couldn’t really pull it away because it was stuck to me. I didn’t know what to do.
“I just ran out of the room to get help, and it kept burning.”
Molly, who was screaming in pain, told how a teacher “dragged me in to the staff base” while calling for an ambulance.
She said: “She took my boot off and I stood in the sink and she just used the teachers’ mugs to irrigate it. I was saying ‘it’s so hot, it’s burning’.”
Molly, speaking on ITV’S This Morning, told presenters Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes how her right leg was scarred, while her left leg escaped with “a couple of splashes”.
She said: “It looks like a birthmark now to be honest, but to start off with it was full thickness burns so I still can’t really feel certain parts of my leg.”
She said she thought Bowen was responsible immediately, and her suspicions were later confirmed by a police investigation.
Molly, who was looking forward to completing her exams and leaving school at the time, revealed she suffered from post traumatic stress after the incident.
She said at one stage she was unable to perform simple tasks such as tidying her room without help from her mother.
But she said that, following counselling, she is now looking forward to starting an apprenticeship in a restaurant.
She said: “It was quite hard to start off with because I went back to school on the Monday – I felt like I needed to for some reason.
“It wasn’t until about January or February this year I started feeling the proper effects of PTSD.
“I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
“It sounds silly but I would start just screaming for no reason – because I didn’t know what was going on in my head and I felt really frustrated.”
She said counselling had helped her come to terms with her situation.
And, in another positive step, she revealed she may soon resume playing the viola, after she took a break from playing the instrument.
Bowen, 18, whose father is a QC, was jailed at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for 21 months.
The court had heard how the girls were both talented musicians, with Bowen playing the clarinet and Molly the viola in the school orchestra.
The court heard that Bowen had also written a fake letter from Molly to herself demanding that she end her own life.