Court Awards Teen €98k After Uncle Introduced Him To Game Of 52 Card Pickup

A 17-YEAR-OLD boy, with what is being described as a permanent case of PTSD, is unable to ever play cards again and now has major trust issues after being forced by his own uncle to pick up a full deck of cards from the floor of his home as a result of being conned into agreeing to play an ‘evil and cruel game’, a court has heard today.

Barrister John Delvin told Judge Thomas Vaught in the Circuit Court that the accused laughed for over ten minutes at the then 14-year-old as he watched him kneel on a cold kitchen floor and pick each individual card up with his hands.

“We were playing 31 and everything was fine,” the victim who cannot be named for legal reasons told the court in a chilling account of the night of December 28th, 2021, “Uncle Martin said he was tired, and I begged him for one more game and he suggested that we should play another game instead called 52 card pickup”.

It is understood the victim was then asked if he wanted to try out the game, with his uncle claiming it was very easy to learn and would take him no time at all to teach him, coaxing him along.

“He even spent some time doing a fancy shuffle while telling me I was going to love this game and will never want to play another card game in my life,” the sobbing teen recalled as members of the boy’s immediate family began shouting at the estranged uncle in the dock, calling him a monster.

“Uncle Martin then put all the cards between his thumb and index finger and slowly squeezed them, catapulting them one by one across the floor – it felt like they were falling in slow motion. I had no idea what was going on. He said, ‘now pick them all up’ and started laughing at me,” he went on in a victim impact statement. “I used to look up to him and trust him. He should have protected me, but he used his position to take advantage of my good nature, and I will never be the same again for it”.

After calling a brief recess to allow for the teen to gather his emotions, Judge Thomas Vaught said he had heard enough and granted the boy €98k in damages and told the 47-year-old uncle that he was an awful bollocks.

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