AUBURN – A Lewiston man was sentenced Friday to four years and three months in prison for stabbing his girlfriend in the head with a kitchen knife.

Jeffrey Coffin wept as he stood before Justice Ellen Gorman in Androscoggin County Superior Court and told her what he remembered about July 9.

“I had my first drink at 9:30 in the morning,” the tall, gray-haired man said. “Then I remember looking at the clock.”

It was 11 a.m.

“The next thing that I recall,” Coffin said, “is a banging on the door.”

It was the police.

Officers had gone to the Pine Street apartment after a neighbor reported a couple fighting inside.

They arrived to find Coffin’s girlfriend covered in blood with several stab wounds in her head. She was screaming that Coffin had been trying to kill her.

“As I was being taken away in handcuffs, I remember looking back and seeing her,” Coffin said, crying and shaking his head. “She was a mess.”

Coffin, 44, was originally charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault. The state dropped the attempted murder charge when Coffin agreed to plead guilty to the less serious charge.

Hours after Coffin entered his plea in January, he was arrested again for allegedly calling the victim and convincing her to meet him at a motel in Rockland. He was charged with violating the conditions of his release and sent back to jail.

“If this doesn’t speak to the nature of domestic violence, I don’t know what does,” Assistant District Attorney Nick Worden said Friday at Coffin’s sentencing hearing.

Arguing for a stiff sentence, Worden told the judge that Coffin was lucky that his girlfriend survived the July 9 attack with only stitches in her head.

“If the knife had been two or three inches to the left or two or three inches to the right, Mr. Coffin would be standing here before you charged with murder,” Worden said.

Worden asked Gorman to sentence Coffin to six years.

Hoping to spend significantly less time in prison, Coffin tried to convince the judge that alcohol is the source of his problems. It was the reason that he spent six months in jail in 1998 for punching the same women in the head, he said, and it was the reason that he came close to killing her last July.

“I had no intent to hurt this girl. That is just not me,” he said. “I have to continue to stay sober. That’s the key. I’m not a threat to anyone as long as I am sober.”

Citing the seriousness of the crime and Coffin’s arrest hours after his guilty plea, Gorman sentenced Coffin to nine years with all but four years and three months suspended, followed by four years of probation.

As conditions of his probation, Coffin will not be allowed to drink or take drugs. He will be barred from having contact with his victim and he will have to undergo treatment for substance abuse and anger management.

“This was a multiple stabbing of a domestic partner,” Gorman said. “It was stopped only because police arrived.”

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