A 51-year-old Santa Monica resident was arrested in his apartment after breaking a rake over his neighbor’s head during a heated argument on Thursday, Oct. 18.
At 5:43 p.m. officers of the Santa Monica Police Department went to the 200 block of Bicknell Street after they had received a report that someone was bleeding from the head after being assaulted.
When the officers arrived they found the victim outside an apartment complex suffering from multiple lacerations to his head, and as the report had intimated, bleeding from them.
This man told the officers (as paramedics tended to his wounds) that he had been involved in a long-standing dispute with a neighbor.
This neighbor’s family happened to own the apartment building that they all lived in.
The victim continued to say that on that day he had returned home with his mother and had discovered that the neighbor had positioned all of the city trash cans (that were assigned to the building) in the driveway that provided access to the victim’s assigned parking space.
The victim said he had asked the neighbor to move the trash cans and this request soon escalated into a heated argument (evidently the resentments all burst to the surface at this point).
The neighbor then punched the victim in the face with a closed fist.
The neighbor then went and grabbed a gardening rake and attacked the victim with it, striking him on the back of his head with such force that it broke the rake.
The neighbor then hurried back into his own apartment. The officers confirmed the story they had heard from the victim by talking with some witnesses, including the victim’s mother, who also claimed the neighbor had dented her car with the rake.
The officers went to the neighbor’s apartment and arrested this Santa Monica resident, and he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and vandalism.
Bail was set at $30,000.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of the Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
