Clerk arrested after hockey stick attack

A 37-year-old convenience store clerk spent the night in the penalty box after an off-duty police officer blew the whistle on his shattering of a window with a hockey stick following a dispute about a woman.

Lawrence police arrested the clerk, who was booked early Tuesday evening into the Douglas County jail on suspicion of aggravated assault, a felony, and misdemeanor criminal damage to property. He was being held without bail, pending a first appearance Wednesday.

Here’s what happened, according to Sgt. Trent McKinley of the Lawrence Police Department:

Shortly after 4 p.m. Tuesday, the clerk at the service station at 955 E. 23rd St. got into an argument — regarding a woman — with a man inside the store. The man threw a couple of small plastic bottles of Coke at the clerk, then left.

The clerk then came outside waving a hockey stick — “apparently very upset,” McKinley said — and started hitting the driver’s side window of the other man’s van. The window shattered, the hockey stick broke, and the clerk went back inside to get a stepladder.

“One weapon doesn’t work, so he goes inside to get another weapon,” McKinley said.

The clerk hit the van again, breaking the driver’s side mirror, before the driver left.

An off-duty police officer saw the whole thing and called in some of his on-duty colleagues. Turns out the confrontation “ensued about a relationship, over a female,” McKinley said.