Carthage man on trial for alleged assault of neighbor

Dec. 1—Jack Davis told a jury Wednesday that he crossed the street to his neighbor Steven Goodman's house in Carthage two years ago to question him about the manner in which he asked his granddaughter to turn down her music.

Davis said Goodman answered the door when he knocked. But Davis had barely managed to ask him what he said to scare his granddaughter when Goodman shoved him backward over a railing and off his porch.

A probable-cause affidavit filed in the assault case alleges that Davis, 62, fell about 5 feet and struck his head on the corner of a concrete step. But that claim was at issue the first day of his 58-year-old neighbor's trial in Jasper County Circuit Court.

Davis acknowledged that he did not know how he sustained the injury to the top of his head. He believed he fell in some bushes and ended up on his feet in Goodman's driveway.

"I was confused," he testified. "I didn't think I was in pain, but I had blood running (down) my face."

It was the serious nature of the injury and what Goodman did next that raised the assault to the level of first degree in the estimate of local law enforcement, as the opening statement of Assistant Prosecutor Taylor Haas made clear.

Taylor told jurors that Goodman informed another neighbor who witnessed the incident and came to the aid of Davis: "If he's not off my property by the time I get back, I'm going to finish him off." He then went around the corner of his house and returned with a can of gasoline, Haas said.

The witness helped Davis back across the street, where he lay down in some grass while an ambulance was called to take him to a hospital. The witness testified Wednesday that she thought Goodman also had a lighter in his hand when he came back with the gasoline.

Lt. Eric Miller, with the Carthage Police Department, who arrived on the scene before Davis was taken to the hospital, testified that he asked Goodman what he was intending to do with the gasoline.

A body camera video of Miller asking Goodman that question recorded the following response: "You really want to know? I was going to gas him up and light him."

But defense attorney Jared Stilley told the seven women and six men picked as jurors for the trial there are a number of inconsistencies in the accounts of the state's witnesses as well as reasons to question the adequacy of Miller's investigation and the purported seriousness of the victim's injury.

Stilley said Davis' granddaughter regularly parked her car on the block of East Centennial Street where the two men live with her music thumping and blaring. On the day in question, his client started to approach her to ask her to turn it down. But before he ever said anything to her, she turned it down, and his client went back to his place, Stilley said.

But the girl told her grandfather that Goodman scared her "half to death," setting in motion all that ensued, the defense attorney said. He pointed out to jurors that Davis was not invited to Goodman's home, that the porch on which the confrontation took place was quite small and that Davis got in Goodman's face and was yelling at him.

According to Stilley, Davis' account as to how he fell changed as to whether he was pushed over the railing or tumbled backward down the steps and that police failed to investigate that discrepancy.

They also never took any photos of Davis' injury, which required no more than three stitches and five staples, Stilley said. He was released from the hospital within a matter of hours, he said.

Under cross-examination by Stilley, Davis acknowledged that he no longer recalls exactly what he said to Goodman when he came to the door. But he denied ever saying that he lost his footing and tumbled backward down the steps of the porch.

"He pushed me to the railing ... the railing," Davis testified under questioning. "I tumbled over the top of the railing."

The trial resumes at 9 a.m. Thursday at the Jasper County Courts Building in Joplin.