By Jeff Lehr
jlehr@joplinglobe.com
A 19-year-old Joplin woman was ordered Wednesday to stand trial on two felony counts related to an assault with a knife in January at the Plaza Apartments.
At the end of a preliminary hearing in Jasper County Associate Circuit Court, Judge Richard Copeland ordered Carina J. Ramos bound over for trial on charges of first-degree assault and armed criminal action.
Ramos is accused of stabbing 14-year-old Roger W. Williams on Jan. 18 during a disturbance inside an apartment on South Rex Avenue where the boy lived with his father. Assistant prosecutor Kimberly Fisher called the father, Roger D. Williams, as the state’s lone witness at the hearing.
The father said he could hear his son, whom he called “Trey,” arguing with Ramos from outside the apartment as he arrived home. He said the argument escalated as he entered the apartment. Ramos struck his son in the face, then pulled out a knife and stabbed the teen in the hand, he said.
Williams told the court that he began maneuvering Ramos out of the apartment at that point.
“She was swinging the knife at me as I got her out of the house,” he said.
He described her behavior as “loud and violent, and very mean,” and acknowledged striking her with a bar stool in his effort to remove her from the home. He said that even after he got her out of the apartment, shut the door and locked it, Ramos continued stabbing the metal door with the knife. The father said he called police at that point.
On cross-examination by public defender Nicki Neil, the father acknowledged that his son and Ramos had been like “two peas in a pod” for about two months before the incident, and that she had seemed to the father to be likable and easygoing enough. He said she often played video games with his son.
Neil asked Williams what the argument concerned. He said Ramos was shouting that his son “owed” her something. The father said he was told that she had been trying to get his son to eat some “bars” and to steal some of his father’s alcohol. The father told the court that he did not know what she meant by “bars.”
A probable-cause affidavit states that the boy told an officer that he met Ramos in the apartment complex’s weight room about a month previously, and that she had been to his apartment several times since then. The night in question, he said, she had been trying to get him to take a “bar,” which he described to the officer as a white, oblong pill. The boy reportedly told police that he did not know what the pill was and refused to take it.
Trial division
The judge set March 22 for the defendant’s first appearance in a trial division of the court.
