By Jeff Lehr
jlehr@joplinglobe.com
A woman testified Wednesday that a Joplin man punched her so hard in the face during a disturbance outside a fast-food restaurant that she is now blind in one eye.
Jessica Miller was the lone witness called to testify at the preliminary hearing of Robert L. Reed Jr. in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin.
Reed, 34, was ordered bound over for trial by Associate Judge Richard Copeland on a charge of first-degree assault at the conclusion of the hearing. The judge set Reed’s first appearance in a trial division of the court for Nov. 16.
Miller told the court that she did not know the defendant when she encountered him about 2 a.m. July 3 in the parking lot of the Hardee’s restaurant at 812 S. Range Line Road. She had gone there to eat with friends after a night at a local nightclub.
Miller said that as they arrived at the restaurant, two men in her party of friends began fighting with each other, and she and their girlfriends attempted to break it up. Reed apparently was among a small crowd of spectators attracted to the fight in the parking lot, and Miller told the court that he tried to pull her away from the combatants.
“I told him to stop touching me because he kept grabbing me,” she said.
She said Reed, who apparently knew one of the two men fighting, told her to mind her own business and let the fight proceed. She said that after he pulled her away a third time, he punched her in her left eye.
“He shattered all the bones around my eye socket and the zygomatic arch,” Miller testified.
A probable-cause affidavit filed by Joplin police states that her eye socket was crushed, her eyeball was ruptured, her cheekbone was shattered and nerves on the left side of her face were severed.
Miller told the court that she never lost consciousness, but she had to be rushed to a Joplin hospital and then transferred to the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan. She said her eyeball was detached by the blow and that she required six surgeries, including extensive facial reconstruction. She has lost all vision in the eye, she told the court.
Public defender Maleia Cheney asked Miller if she had shoved or tried to hit Reed as he was pulling her away from the two combatants.
“No, I didn’t touch him,” she said.
Knocked out of shoes
A probable-cause affidavit filed by a Joplin Police Department investigator in connection with a parking lot assault case states that a witness told officers that Jessica Miller was hit so hard that she literally was knocked out of her shoes. There was no testimony to that detail at Wednesday’s hearing.
