WESTFIELD – A resident of General Shepard Apartments suffered only a minor injury after he awoke to find a man armed with a knife standing next to his bed and threatening to kill him.
The man had been awakened, police report, when his wife screamed after she awoke to see the man, dressed in black, standing over her husband holding a knife from her kitchen.
Police report that the man in bed grabbed for the knife and sustained a cut on his hand but the couple fought off the man who fled.
The incident was reported to police at 3:16 a.m. Monday, who found that the man had broken into the ground floor apartment via a laundry room.
Officer Efrain Luna reports he had been in the area investigating another break-in but, when he heard the dispatcher report the incident at General Shepard Apartments, he moved that way to help.
He said that he approached traveling the wrong way on one-way Chapel Street and surprised a man dressed in black who fled through Monroe Street backyards when he saw Luna’s cruiser.
Luna initiated a foot pursuit and, with Officer Jared Rowe who was also looking for the suspect, detained the man on Monroe Street.
The two victims were transported there, separately, and each identified the man as the intruder who, they said, stated when he was in their apartment that he was going to kill them. Both said that the man was unknown to them.
The man was not found to be in possession of a knife but the one the victims said the one he had been holding was subsequently found in the apartment.
The man, identified as Jason D. Hannum, 25, of 59 King St., was arrested and arraigned later yesterday in Westfield District Court before Judge Philip A. Contant on charges of armed assault during a burglary, breaking and entering in the nighttime with intent to commit a felony, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, assault with a dangerous weapon and threatening to commit a crime.
He was held without right to bail pending a dangerousness hearing scheduled for May 28.
