photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Dustin Lane appears Friday, Sept. 13, 2024, in Douglas County District Court.

A man’s preliminary hearing for attempted murder began dramatically Friday with the alleged victim, before the judge even took the bench, claiming loudly and profanely to the gallery that she was never going to testify and begging repeatedly to leave.

She nevertheless was called as the first witness against Dustin Ian Lane, 39, whom Judge Sally Pokorny, by hearing’s end, would order to stand trial for attempted second-degree murder and aggravated intimidation of a witness.

On the stand, the woman declined to testify, claiming that she didn’t remember anything and even trying to invoke a Fifth Amendment privilege, until Senior Assistant District Attorney Ricardo Leal asked Pokorny to hold her in contempt, which Pokorny threatened to do. The woman then acknowledged that she spoke to police on the night in question, but she declined to say anything else. Pokorny then excused her from the witness stand while keeping her under subpoena.

The charges relate to an incident on July 21, when a 911 dispatcher received a 4 a.m. phone call, which was played in court Friday. The call was from a crying, panicked, breathless woman — the woman who refused to testify — begging the police to hurry to her house on West 28th Street because Lane had “beat the (expletive) out of me” and “is going to kill me.” The woman, who said she was pregnant, was outside the home, but Lane was inside — drunk and high, she said — with her two young children. “He’s going to murder me,” she said, and “he just choked me out.”

“I’m so scared,” she continued. “Get my babies out of that (expletive) house!”

When Officer Justin Snipes arrived at the home, he testified Friday, the woman grabbed onto him and said, “Dustin is trying to kill me.”

Snipes said Lane was standing in the backdoor. When asked to come out of the house, he did, and he was placed under arrest.

Snipes said the woman then gave her account of what had happened: Lane was drunk and high and left the house to buy marijuana, but he returned with a “sack of cocaine.” She demanded that he get it out of the house because of the children. She started to make a recording of her begging him to get rid of the cocaine, but he grabbed her phone away to prevent her from calling police. She said he then dragged her by the hair from the living room to a bedroom, threw her on the bed, and punched and strangled her until she nearly lost consciousness, as he was repeatedly threatening to kill her.

At some point she was able to get away from him, but she fell, and he punched her several more times and strangled her again until she nearly blacked out. Her dog then began attacking Lane, which allowed her to get free, grab Lane’s phone, run out of the house and call police.

Another officer testified that she later found the woman’s own phone hidden, presumably by Lane, in a bedroom closet under a pile of blankets and clothes.

Snipes told the court that he observed injuries to the woman’s head, neck and shoulder. The injuries on her neck, he said, were consistent with being choked, and she was taken to the hospital. As he testified, Snipes reviewed the photos he had taken, but they were not displayed so that others in the courtroom could see them. Photos were also taken in subsequent days to document the progression of the woman’s injuries over time.

At the conclusion of testimony Friday, defense attorney Michael Clarke argued that the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office, represented by Leal and prosecutor Jenna Phelps, had “wildly overcharged” the case and said that the woman’s injuries were “so minor” — at most, aggravated domestic battery, he said, not attempted murder.

The judge disagreed with that assessment and ordered Lane to stand trial on both of the charges: attempted second-degree murder and aggravated intimidation of a witness.

Lane then pleaded not guilty and was ordered to appear for trial on Nov. 4. He is currently in custody, with a bond set at $50,000 cash or surety.

Lane has previous felony convictions in Douglas county for drug possession in 2014 and again in 2017, making a false report in 2017, and aggravated assault in 2007, according to Kansas Department of Corrections records.