Woman assaulted at music festival by girl ‘looking for fight’

A student fears she has suffered permanent eye damage after she was allegedly attacked at a music festival.

Riqui Vines went to the Lost and Found Music Festival on October 15 when a younger woman allegedly attacked her unprovoked.

A woman fears she has suffered permanent eye damage after she was allegedly assaulted by another woman “looking for a fight” at a music festival in central Queensland.

Central Queensland University student Riqui Vines said she was punched and elbowed in the face by a younger woman while enjoying the Lost and Found Music Festival at the Rockhampton Showgrounds on Saturday, October 15.

The 26-year-old woman was left knocked unconscious, left with swelling to her face and a serious eye injury after she bumped into her alleged attacker.

Riqui Vines went to the Lost and Found Music Festival on October 15, when a younger woman allegedly attacked her unprovoked.

“I went to the concert with my aunty; we went for a dance in the mosh pit at about 6.30pm and gradually made our way to the front of the mosh,” Ms Vines said.

“A couple of young girls cautioned me that this girl (the alleged attacker) was being aggressive towards them, but I was having too much fun to take much notice.

“The crowd was pushing and shoving, which is normal in the mosh pit, and I got pushed into her and she hit me in the lip and busted my lip.

“I hit her back straight away to defend myself and then I told her to settle down because we were all there to have fun and we don’t want to get kicked out,” she said.

Riqui Vines and her aunt Angela Elliott went to the Lost and Found Music Festival on October 15, where Ms Vines was allegedly brutally assaulted by another woman who was ‘looking for a fight’.

Ms Vines thought the confrontation had ended, as the other woman appeared to calm down and everyone kept dancing, but things took a turn for the worse as Australian rapper Masked Wolf was taking the stage, with a large number of people entering the mosh pit and pushing towards the front.

“I was pushed into this girl and out of the blue, she just elbowed me in the eye,” Ms Vines said.

“I fell back into other people and everything was a daze from there; she had concussed me, I didn’t know what had happened.

“I was trying to get back up because it looked like she was going to go to me again, but I couldn’t stand.

“My aunty saw her going for me and grabbed her and she punched my aunty in the forehead, then my aunty got her to the ground and she crawled out of the mosh pit,” she said.

Riqui Vines’ eye was left bloodshot following the music festival incident.

“I couldn’t walk, I could barely move, my eyes were rolling back in my head and I was falling in and out of consciousness,” Ms Vines remembered.

“I ended up being taken to the Rockhampton Hospital in an ambulance and they wheeled me in. It was really busy, and I could barely walk and wasn’t making any sense.

“The waiting room was packed and it had been about two hours since I was hit and I remember all the pain starting to hit me. I was in agony and crying out in the waiting room.”

Ms Vines was rushed to the Capricorn Coast Hospital for pain relief and urgent care by her mother, who drove to her from Yeppoon.

Riqui Vines, 26, is apprehensive about going to music festivals again after her alleged assault.

“I have a concussion and I also have to go to an optometrist because I have blurry vision in the injured eye, but whether there is permanent damage, we will know once the swelling goes down” Ms Vines said.

“My face is pretty puffy, my eye is starting to open, it was giving me headaches not being able to open my eye. I have blood all through the whites of my eye.

“We were having so much fun, we were dancing with other girls I made friends with in the mosh pit and bumping into each other, it’s just what happens at festivals,” she said.

Riqui Vines says she suffered headaches in the aftermath of the alleged assault.

Ms Vines said she was just trying to have a good time and she has “never been in a fight before, never even seen a fight at a festival before”.

“It’s not usually the type of festival I would attend; I prefer Australian and indie rock bands; the only reason we went was because my aunty got free tickets.

“I have been to a lot of festivals before and if people were being too rough in the crowd, they always stop the show and ask people to calm down, but nobody stopped this.

“It was too chaotic, too aggressive and while there was security there, it felt like the festival goers were left to sort it out themselves in the crowd.”

Riqui Vines put a call-out on Facebook asking for help to identify her alleged attacker.

Ms Vines was told the alleged attacker was arrested but when she went to the police station the next day to give her statement, her description of her alleged attacker did not match the person they had arrested.

Ms Vines put a call-out on Facebook asking for help to identify her alleged attacker from a photo taken at the festival. She received “more than 40 messages”.

“Most people said she’s notorious for this kind of behaviour, so I took the new information to the police station,” Ms Vines confirmed.

“I’d like to see her behind bars. It was a completely unprovoked attack and I never had the chance to defend myself,” Ms Vines enforced.

Police investigations are ongoing, but Queensland police have not charged anyone for the incident.

NCA NewsWire has contacted the Lost and Found Music Festival’s organisers.