AUBURN — A Lewiston woman who attacked her boyfriend with a hammer because he was lazy, she said, pleaded guilty Thursday to aggravated assault.
Crystal Foss, 34, of 242 Park St. appeared in Androscoggin County Superior Court to change her plea from not guilty.
Aggravated assault is a Class B crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Judge Maria Woodman ordered Foss to be held without bail until her sentencing next month. At that time, a judge will decide how much time Foss will serve.
Had her case gone to trial, Assistant District Attorney Andrew Matulis told the judge that he would have called as a witness Lewiston police Cpl. Matthew Vierling, who was dispatched to Foss’s home April 5, 2016, to help ambulance workers with a 48-year-old man who was being treated for head lacerations. The man told him that Foss, his girlfriend at the time, attacked him with a hammer in the kitchen of their apartment when he had entered to retrieve his coat.
The victim, who was taken to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, would have testified that Foss hit him in the head several times with the hammer, then used it on his ribs or had kicked him there.
Vierling would have testified that Foss told him she struck her boyfriend four times.
“When asked why, she said because he is lazy and she didn’t care if he was dead,” Matulis said the officer would testify about what Foss told him.
Vierling would have said on the witness stand that he saw a blood trail that led to Foss’s apartment kitchen. He took photographs to document the crime scene, Matulis said.
Another Lewiston officer had interviewed Foss, who told him the same sequence of events she related to Vierling. She told Officer Tyler Martin that she hadn’t been responding to a physical confrontation and no one had threatened her, Matulis said.
According to a police affidavit, police found a hammer that appeared to have dried blood on it on a stool in the kitchen.
A doctor at CMMC would have testified that the victim sustained four head lacerations that took 10 staples to close, Matulis said.
cwilliams@sunjournal.com
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