photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World Photo

Brandon Eugene Snow is pictured Friday, July 31, 2026, in Douglas County District Court.

A man accused of hitting a woman, pulling her hair and chasing her with a baseball bat earlier this year at and outside the Lawrence Public Library was ordered on Friday to stand trial on a charge of aggravated assault.

At a preliminary hearing, Judge Stacey Donovan found that the state had produced sufficient evidence to bind Brandon Eugene Snow over for trial. Snow, 35, is a homeless man, and the case he’s currently facing stems from an incident on Feb. 4, 2026.

Prosecutor Todd Hiatt said the evidence was clear that Snow was chasing the woman outside the library and that she was afraid. “She literally runs like crazy to get away from him,” Hiatt told Donovan.

But defense attorney Razmi Tahirkheli said that there was a whole crowd of people waiting at the bus stop across from the Lawrence Public Library, and that by Hiatt’s logic, “you could charge anybody in that crowd.”

One person who testified at Friday’s hearing was another homeless woman who was in the crowd at the bus stop. She testified that she knew Snow as “Short Man” and was familiar with him and the alleged victim from them all being homeless and frequenting certain places. But she said she wasn’t close with Snow or the alleged victim.

On the night of the incident, she testified, she was sitting at the bus stop across the street from the library and saw the alleged victim and Snow. The alleged victim was running across the street, she said, “and he was chasing after her with a bat.”

Hiatt asked how the alleged victim looked.

“Terrified,” the witness said. “She was crying and screaming.” She said the woman got close enough to her that, were it not for the glass of the bus shelter between them, she might have been able to reach out and touch her.

Snow “looked pissed off,” the witness said, and was yelling profanities at the woman, calling her “a whore” and other “angry” names.

The court also heard testimony from Lawrence Police Cpl. Robert Egidy and Tristan Star, a security supervisor at the library.

Star recalled going to the library’s downstairs computer lab to check on a disturbance there, where he found a woman “who seemed like she was bothered, for sure.” On the way there, he said he passed Snow but didn’t interact with him at all.

Then he said he viewed the security camera footage from the computer lab. He said it showed Snow leaning over by the alleged victim – “kind of in her ear, really close” – and, after a couple of minutes, “I saw him grab her hair and hit her.”

The video was played back in court multiple times from two angles, and Star pointed out Snow and the alleged victim in it.

He also said he saw the alleged victim walking across the street on the camera out front of the building, Snow crossing the street with a bat, and then the woman running away.

Tahirkheli asked him about what Snow was doing in that footage, and Star said he believed Snow was following the woman. “That’s what you believe,” Tahirkheli said, “but you don’t know that?”

“I believe he was following her path,” Star replied.

Egidy said he responded to the original disturbance inside the library, and was talking with Star when an altercation began across the street. He didn’t see it himself, but he did see a verbal argument between Snow and the alleged victim, he testified. And he said several people at the bus stop pointed out Snow as the one who had been chasing the woman.

When he spoke with Snow, he said Snow identified himself but refused to answer questions about the woman or their relationship. He ultimately arrested Snow on an outstanding warrant and in connection with the library incident.

The alleged victim herself did not testify; Hiatt said there had been difficulties in serving her with a subpoena in time. But Hiatt did call Cicely Thornton, a former city homeless services worker who knew both Snow and the woman on sight, and had her identify the woman. Tahirkheli asked her about whether she could identify her just from the video, not from previous knowledge of the case, and she said she was confident in her identification: “Her mannerisms are even the same” as the alleged victim, she said of the woman walking across the street.

Donovan found that the state had met its burden, and she bound Snow over and set a two-day trial for Nov. 23 and 24.

Because Snow is indigent and had been in custody since his arrest, Tahirkheli requested that he be released on an own-recognizance bond while awaiting trial. “Mr. Snow has been incarcerated for quite some time now,” Tahirkheli said.

Hiatt noted that Snow had a history of failing to appear in court, and Donovan ordered a bond screening and took the request under advisement.

Before this case, Snow had another case in Douglas County District Court in which he was accused, but ultimately acquitted, of threatening a person with an ax near a Lawrence homeless camp, as the Journal-World reported.