The hand-scrawled sign hanging in the window of a Unity home over the weekend read, “Call 911.”
After seeing it, someone did just that.
State police arrived Saturday at the Pearl Lane home for a reported domestic assault. Inside, troopers reported finding a woman “visibly distraught” and “still bleeding from three lacerations on her face.” She said she had been assaulted and choked by her boyfriend, James O. Vickers, 45, during an argument, Trooper Daniel Grabowski wrote in court documents.
“She said she believed she was going to die due to Vickers strangling her,” Grabowski wrote.
When troopers asked Vickers to step out of the home to be questioned, Grabowski said he refused, “becoming verbally aggressive.”
Grabowski said, during the confrontation, he spotted Vickers with a folding knife clipped to his pants pocket and attempted to detain him.
“He began to flail and pull away from me while screaming obscenities… he continued to scream obscenities after being told to be quiet,” Grabowski reported.
During the investigation, Grabowski said troopers seized a plastic baggie protruding from a pocket of a sweatshirt Vickers had put on the living room couch that contained suspected methamphetamine. In another search of Vickers after he was taken into custody, police reported he had another “large” plastic bag of suspected methamphetamine tucked into his right sock, two small baggies of methamphetamine stuffed in a pants pocket and another baggie containing several oxycodone pills in another pocket.
Vickers was charged with disorderly conduct, harassment, illegal possession of methamphetamine and oxycodone, possession of drug paraphernalia, reckless endangerment, resisting arrest, simple assault and strangulation. He was ordered to the county jail on $25,000 bond pending a preliminary hearing March 1. He did not have an attorney listed in court documents.
According to online court records, in 2018 Vickers pleaded guilty to strangulation charges filed by state police in connection with an assault on a woman while visiting Linn Run State Park on July 20, 2017. He was sentenced to six to 23 months in prison and two months probation.
He was released from probation in October, according to online court dockets.
