How history nearly repeated for a Beatle at the hands of a troubled fan
Unlike his former bandmate John Lennon, Harrison survived the attack by a knife-wielding attacker, though Harrison's friends and family speculated it ultimately hastened his death less than two years later.
It was a moment of horrible deja vu for music fans around the world — a mentally unwell man had attacked one of the Beatles, leaving him for dead.
It's a headline that could have been from December 8, 1980, but it is also sadly true of this day, December 30, 1999, when George Harrison was stabbed in his home.
Unlike his former bandmate John Lennon, Harrison survived the attack by a knife-wielding attacker, though Harrison's friends and family speculated it ultimately hastened his death from lung cancer less than two years later.
But like the fatal attack on Lennon outside the Dakota Building in New York, the stabbing of Harrison was another case of someone with mental health issues slipping through the cracks and not getting the help they needed before doing something horrible to a much-loved musician.
A troubled man struggling
About a month before he broke into Harrison's home and stabbed the former Beatle, Michael Abram was in a psychiatric ward in Merseyside, the English county centred around Liverpool.
The 33-year-old father-of-two had been grappling with addiction and undiagnosed schizophrenia for the previous decade, according to the BBC and The Guardian reporting at the time and had been taken to a Merseyside hospital in November 1999 by police.
Abram's mother Lydia told the BBC the health system had failed her son and was "totally and completely useless".
After leaving hospital, Abram returned to the 10th floor flat where he lived alone in Liverpool, sitting "on an up-turned plant pot" in his "sparsely-furnished rooms", listening to The Beatles, John Lennon, U2 and Bob Marley, a court later heard.
His neighbours watched him walk to the chemist each week to collect his methadone, singing Beatles' songs as he went.
All the while, Abram was sinking further and further into his delusions.
The hearings held in the wake of Harrison's stabbing heard Abram had witnessed a total eclipse on August 11, 1999, which led him to believe he was St Michael and on a mission from God to kill Harrison, who Abram believed to be the "phantom menace" that was possessing him.
"He thought George Harrison was the alien from hell," psychiatrist Phillip Joseph told the court.
"He thought the Beatles were witches flying on broomsticks from hell."
A policeman stands guard outside Harrison's home after the stabbing. (Reuters)
The attack
Harrison lived at Friar Park, a Victorian mansion built in 1889 that he'd purchased in 1970, at Henley-on-Thames, west of London, some 300 kilometres south-east of Abram's Liverpool home.