FROM THE BLOTTER: Bat, hammer used in assault

WASILLA — Police have arrested three men in connection with a brutal attack at a campground on Lake Lucille.

According to a Wasilla Police Department press release, officers were called to the campground behind the Iditarod headquarters on June 9.

There they found that three men had conspired to beat another man.

“It was a number of young people partying and one guy was asked to leave and he either got slapped or punched and he left and came back with friends to retaliate,” said police spokesman Officer Rick Manrique.

He said witnesses reported the man who slapped the guy who was asked to leave was the target of the beating. One man held the victim’s friends back with an assault rifle to keep them from intervening.

The man who was slapped and the third man did the beating.

“He takes a baseball bat and a framing hammer and commences to beating the new victim, which was the original assailant,” Manrique said.

He said he couldn’t detail the extent of the victim’s injuries, but described them as “pretty significant.”

“It’s amazing he wasn’t killed. It really is,” Manrique said.

Three men were arrested and charged with the attack. The press release didn’t say, and Manrique couldn’t clarify, which role each of the three men played. Dae J. Poteet, 20, and David Keene, 21, were jailed on $100,000 bail apiece. Perrin Pollard, 20, was jailed on $20,000 bail.

Utah man charged with kidnapping, assault

TRAPPER CREEK — Alaska State Troopers are charging a Utah man with kidnapping, saying he refused to let a family member leave a lodge while he assaulted her.

According a trooper press statement, hotel security summoned troopers to the Princess Mt. McKinley Lodge at 4:43 a.m. Sunday.

Troopers say David Joseph Cannon, 23, of Brigham, Utah, “assaulted a family member with numerous objects” and “also attempted to suffocate her.”

He was jailed at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility charged with kidnapping and four counts of assault. Jail records Monday morning showed he was still incarcerated.

Man loses fingers in chainsaw accident

SUTTON — A 50-year-old man had to be airlifted from East Twin Hills Lane following a chainsaw accident Saturday.

Borough Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan said the call to respond to the accident came at 11:07 p.m. and a medic was on scene less than 20 minutes later. He said the victim lost some or all of his fingers on one hand.

“The way it was described to me it was right at the junction of where his fingers and his hand come together,” Brodigan said of the cut from the saw. “Those are always nasty accidents.”

Privacy laws to which Brodigan is not immune prohibit emergency medical personnel from identifying patients and a software glitch prevented him from saying which hospital the man was flown to.