By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

A Jasper County jury began hearing evidence Wednesday in the case of a Webb City man charged with seven felony counts, including an assault on a state trooper.

Assistant Prosecutor Jeremy Crowley told jurors during opening statements of a two-day trial in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin that George B. McDonald, 34, went on “a weeklong crime spree” that culminated on Feb. 1 of 2007 with a vehicular assault on Sgt. Mike Bryan of the Missouri State Highway Patrol along Missouri Highway 171 one mile south of Asbury.

“That stretch of highway is where his crimes finally caught up with him,” Crowley told the jury.

The alleged crimes of McDonald that the prosecutor laid out for jurors began with the theft of a Mitsubishi car Jan. 29 from an employee of Hank’s Furniture, George Sarson Jr. The car, which contained Sarson’s wallet, driver license and credit card, eventually was abandoned and recovered by police, but the wallet and its contents were no longer in it, Crowley said.

The defendant, the prosecutor alleged, next stole a Ford Freestar van belonging to the employer of Stephanie Hallet, and then is believed to have broken into a car parked outside the home of Pittsburg State University student Ashley Erdman in Asbury. Erdman’s purse containing a credit card and bank debit card was stolen from the vehicle.

The night of Jan. 31, 2007, in the midst of an ice storm, John Crandon, who was living in Carl Junction at the time, lost control of his Mazda on the highway south of Asbury and it slid into the ditch, where he was forced to leave it overnight, Crowley said. The next morning, Bryan, the state trooper, was patrolling the highway and spotted a Freestar van parked near the car in the ditch with a man in its back seat.

When he pulled over to find out what was going on, McDonald got out of the Mazda and told Bryan he was waiting for a tow truck to come and get his friend’s car out of the ditch, Crowley said. Bryan asked to see a wallet he spotted in his back pocket and it turned out to contain Sarson’s driver license, he said. Bryan noticed the rear passenger window of the Mazda broken out at that point. But when he began to question McDonald about it, the defendant suddenly began running, Crowley told the jury.

The state trooper pursued him and tackled him twice, scuffling with McDonald in the frozen ditch before McDonald broke free and jumped in the van, Crowley said. The state trooper broke the driver’s side window of the van in an effort to stop him, but McDonald turned the vehicle’s steering wheel to the left and tried to take off, knocking the state trooper back into the ditch, the prosecutor said.

But the van became stuck in the ditch and McDonald jumped out of it and tried to flag down a vehicle on the highway before fleeing along some railroad tracks next to the highway, where two tow truck drivers called to the scene eventually helped the state trooper apprehend him, the prosecutor said.

Bryan reportedly suffered deep bone bruising on the left side of his body from his shoulder to his knee. Besides the assault on Bryan, McDonald is facing two counts of tampering with a vehicle, two counts of theft of a credit card and single counts of attempted stealing of a motor vehicle and resisting arrest.

McDonald’s attorney, public defender Darren Wallace, told jurors in his opening statement that none of the alleged victims in the case, other than the trooper, saw his client do anything. He told them that testimony also will show that it was not an intentional attempted assault on Bryan with the van.