photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured on Sept. 4, 2024.

A Douglas County jury took less than 40 minutes Tuesday to acquit a man of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon — in a case where the state said the defendant pulled a menacing knife but the defendant said it was simply a flashlight.

The defendant, Anthony D. Davis, was accused of pointing a 7- to 8-inch knife at a Dillons employee on Nov. 2, 2023, after the employee confronted him about some beer that he believed Davis was attempting to steal.

The employee, a meat cutter at the grocery store on Massachusetts Street, testified that he observed Davis acting fidgety as he walked by the meat counter, so he trailed him. He believed that Davis had grabbed three to four beers and, since the beers weren’t in Davis’ basket as he neared the exit, that Davis had concealed them in his puffy coat. He said that when he asked Davis to hand over the beer that Davis took a large knife from his coat pocket and pointed it at him, causing him to jump back in alarm. “Holy sh-t!” was his reaction, as he described it to a police officer who came to the store to investigate.

The state, represented by Assistant District Attorneys Madeline Bjorklun and Jenna Phelps, argued that the employee’s three decades as a meat cutter made him very familiar with knives and that he was not mistaken in what he saw just one to two feet from him. They said store surveillance footage showed the employee recoiling at the site of a blade, his hands to his chest.

The surveillance footage, however, appeared to be recorded from a distance and was less than sharp, apparently leaving open to interpretation what item Davis held. Prosecutors asked jurors to see that it was shaped like a knife, in addition to heeding the employee’s testimony that it was indeed a knife.

Defense attorneys Gary West and Allyson Monson, however, argued that the way Davis held the item — in both hands at one point, with one hand where the blade would be — was not the way that anyone would hold a knife. They argued that the employee — who had already pegged Davis as a thief — saw a knife because “you see what you want to see.”

Davis, taking the stand in his own defense Monday, testified that the item was not a knife but was two small flashlights — an item admitted into evidence — that he had taped together to use for nighttime “dumpster diving.” He said he felt “scared, nervous and confused” when the store employee “aggressively” accused him of stealing and that he pulled the flashlight out not to assault the employee but to show that it was the only thing he had in his pocket.

Jurors had the option to find Davis guilty of the lesser included offense of assault — that is, a finding that Davis put the store employee in reasonable apprehension of immediate bodily harm, minus a deadly weapon — but they declined to do so, finding Davis not guilty after deliberations that lasted about 37 minutes.