`Pumpkin`s` dad returns to Auckland

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DISGRACED football star Wayne Carey came from a violent home and sought refuge with his mother and siblings in an Adelaide women`s shelter.

Jacquelynne Willcox, a former worker at the Naomi Women`s Shelter in Adelaide, said it was clear Carey, then aged 10, was a very troubled boy during his time at the refuge.

The ex-footballer has been in hiding since reports two weeks ago that he "glassed" girlfriend Kate Neilson at an exclusive Miami restaurant.

The young Carey was among a group of children she would walk daily to the local primary school, and she said he kept his "extremely agitated manner" longer than his siblings did.

He refused to hold hands with the little children to cross the road safely and preferred to run into on-coming traffic. She said he always appeared to be on the verge of self-destruction.

She believed then that Carey may just have been trying to prove himself, and that he was always uncomfortable about being forced to live with other women and their children.

Ms Willcox, now director of public affairs at Hill & Knowlton Australia, wrote about her memory of the young future star, saying she hoped Carey would speak about his family experience with domestic violence when he finally breaks his silence.

"What the latest revelation in his rich pantheon of appalling behaviour reveals is that the deep bruise left by domestic violence rarely disappears and often recurs," Ms Willcox wrote in The Australian newspaper. "It also tells us sport, even elite sport, is not a cure-all. And nor can it be.

"Sadly, all that rigorous training, band-of-brotherhood culture does not make men from boys."

Carey, 36, faces Miami-Dade County Court this week on two counts of battery on a law enforcement officer and one of resisting an officer with violence.

Details about the US attack came just two days after police called to his Port Melbourne apartment after a domestic disturbance subdued him with capsicum spray on January 27.

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