Terry Green III, charged with four counts of felonious assault in connection with an April stabbing incident in Lima, was found not guilty of all charges Tuesday following three hours of jury deliberation.
J Swygart | The Lima News
LIMA — An Allen County jury deliberated for three hours Tuesday before exonerating Lima resident Terry Green, on trial for stabbing two individuals during a domestic dispute of sorts earlier this year, by returning verdicts of not guilty.
Green took the witness stand Tuesday as the trial’s final witness and claimed he acted in self defense during the incident, maintaining that he produced a pocket knife and stabbed his attacker because he feared for his own safety as well as that of two women at his home.
Sympathetic jurors found the 37-year-old Lima man innocent on four second-degree felony counts of felonious assault for his role in the April altercation that left two people suffering from stab wounds.
Green, 37, of Lima, was indicted in June on four second-degree felony counts of felonious assault for his role in an April altercation that left two people suffering from stab wounds. He took the witness stand in Allen County Common Pleas Court after prosecutors rested their case Tuesday morning. Testimony in the trial concluded late in the day and jurors began their deliberations at 4:30 p.m.
‘He hit me first’
Green testified that on the evening of April 12 he was at his home on Saint Clair Avenue in Lima when Desiree Long, with whom he shares a child, and Kaely Tippe, Long’s cousin, arrived unannounced. A short time later Lance Crabtree, with whom Long also shares a child, pulled up outside the residence and attempted to resume an argument with Long that reportedly had started earlier that day.
Green said Crabtree was sitting in his truck when Tippe climbed onto the vehicle and punched him “two or three times” through the truck’s open window. At that point, Green testified, Crabtree became “very aggressive” and was yelling and cursing at Long.
“Then he (Crabtree) got out of his truck and sprinted toward Desiree. I stepped in between him and my son’s mother,” Green told jurors. “Then (Crabtree) punched me in the face and that’s when I pulled out my knife.”
Prior to his testimony, jurors had observed a video of Green taken during an interview with law enforcement following his arrest. On that video Green recalled “swinging crazily” with the knife in his hands after Crabtree charged him and wrestled him to the ground. It was during that exchange that Tippe “got between us and also got stabbed, I guess,” he told detectives.
Prosecutors said Tippe suffered serious wounds to the fingers on one hand as the result of the knife attack that was aimed at Crabtree.
“He hit me first,” Green said of Crabtree. “I was defending myself and everybody there. I was afraid for my life. He was acting crazy. He attacked me on my property and I was defending myself 100%,” Green told detectives from the Allen County Sheriff’s Office in the interview played for jurors.
