A lawnmower-blade-swinging Ocala man was arrested Thursday night after a woman’s daughter called a Marion County sheriff’s deputy for help.
When the deputy arrived at the home located on NW 66th Street, the woman’s 17-year-old daughter said she came home from school shopping and found her mother and 70-year-old Jeffery Lynn Vaughn yelling at each other in the garage. The daughter said she saw Vaughn pick up a lawnmower blade and lift it over his head “in an apparent attempt to hit her mother with it,” a sheriff’s office report states.
The daughter added that her mother ran away from Vaughn and she had to then take the weapon away from him.
The girl’s mother said she believed Vaughn “had been drinking all day and became argumentative with her.” She told the deputy she was standing outside the garage about four feet away from Vaughn when he grabbed the large metal lawnmower blade and “raised it up like he was going to hit her with it,” the report says, adding that the woman “was afraid he would hurt her” and she ran around the back of the house to get away.
The deputy noted in the report that he saw a two-foot-long piece of metal with sharpened edges propped up in the garage where the woman and her daughter said Vaughn grabbed it.
After being read his rights, Vaughn refused to make a statement to the deputy. He was transported to the Marion County Jail, charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill and held with no bond.