PARIS – A West Paris man charged with whacking his 68-year-old mother atop the head with a hammer, and a Dixfield woman accused of siccing her pit bull on police were among 36 people indicted Wednesday by an Oxford County grand jury.

Stephen Vincent Geyer, 39, was charged with elevated aggravated assault, Maine’s equivalent of attempted homicide, a Class A felony. Geyer will be summoned on the charge.

According to investigating State Trooper James Nolan, Geyer got into an argument on June 27 with his mother, Dora Hoyt, over Geyer’s 6-year-old child, at Hoyt’s house on Route 26, or Bethel Road.

Nolan said the argument started verbally, then escalated into pushing and shoving between both adults. Then, Geyer apparently grabbed a nearby hammer and hit Hoyt on top of her head with it, before fleeing the house, according to Nolan.

Hoyt was treated at Stephens Memorial Hospital in Norway for a large cut on her scalp, and multiple bruises, then released.

Geyer has remained behind bars in Oxford County Jail since his arrest, unable to make bail of either $50,000 or $100,000 real estate.

At a motion’s hearing on Thursday morning in Oxford County Superior Court in Paris, Geyer’s lawyer, John J. Jenness Jr., said his client has multiple sclerosis.

“There is a history between Geyer and his mother, and him being placed in a foster home over issues with her care,” Jenness told Justice Roland A. Cole.

The case remains in the motions process.

In the Dixfield police case, Elizabeth F. Crockett, 45, of 9 Norton Road, Dixfield, was charged with assault on an officer and criminal threatening, both Class C felonies, and refusing to submit to arrest, regarding an incident that happened on the evening of July 31. She will be summoned on the charges.

The incident began when the Rumford Police Department asked Dixfield police to warn Crockett to stop making unnecessary or harassing calls to the Rumford department. Officer Jeff Howe responded, assisted by two Mexico patrolmen, Jeff Stoddard and Ed Broughton.

According to Dixfield police Chief Richard A. Pickett, the officers approached the house to speak to her when Crockett came to the door with a pit bull on a leash.

Dixfield Patrolman Mark Dow, reading from Howe’s report Thursday night, said the officers asked her to secure the dog, but she didn’t.

Crockett, contacted Thursday night at her home, said she did secure the dog in the house initially, but then walked out with it holding its collar, not a leash, when the officers headed toward their cruisers.

“When she came out with the dog, they asked her repeatedly to secure the dog and she repeatedly refused,” Dow said.

Crockett said the officers might have told her to do that, but said they had their guns out when they approached her house. She claimed there were four officers there; police said there were three. Pickett said the officers didn’t draw their weapons until the dog lunged at them.

“I am manic depressive, so I was so scared, I just lost it,” Crockett said.

Crockett said she was turning to take her dog into the house when she says the collar twisted and broke. She claims the dog was running away from the officers when it was shot, not towards them.

Pickett said the collar didn’t break, that Crockett instead let the dog go and it lunged at Stoddard.

Dow said two officers shot the pit bull, killing it before it could harm them.

That’s when Crockett said she ran to the dog, knowing it was dying, and, she said, she was tackled by the officers.

“They took her collar and her body. I’m going to get a lawyer and take a lie detector test, and challenge them to, too,” Crockett said.

Additionally, she said she was surprised to learn that she had been indicted by the grand jury, and that a third charge, refusing to submit to arrest, had been tacked on. She said she had not yet been summoned.