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HOLLIDAYSBURG -- A registered nurse for UPMC's Family Hospice and Palliative Care agency held a courtroom spellbound Tuesday as she related how she survived a brutal knife attack upon visiting the home of one of her patients.
For seemingly no reason, the patient's 15-year-old grandson, identified as Michael Douglas Watson of Stone Row Drive near Williamsburg, while escorting her out of his grandfather's home, struck her on the back as she was about to enter her car.
She turned and looked at him and saw a knife.
He struck her in the abdomen with the knife -- also described as a sword during the lengthy hearing before Blair County President Judge Elizabeth Doyle.
She screamed and tried to get away, according to her testimony, but Watson stabbed her again, this time in the neck.
"I was screaming for help. I was praying," she related in a steady, quiet voice.
She was on her knees by this point and he stabbed her again.
She remembered thinking, "If he does this again, I'm dying."
She grabbed the knife with her right hand.
"He's telling me to die … that I was going to die," she said in a voice breaking with emotion.
She pleaded for him to let her go. He said "no" because she would call the police.
The nurse replied, she would not call the police.
He was to her right, she said, and she doesn't remember what occurred next but somehow she made it into her car. She recognized immediately that she was seriously injured. She used one hand to pinch her bleeding jugular vein and the other to drive and to call for help.
Upon arriving in Williamsburg, she was too weak to go farther.
But her call for help was completed and she ended up in the ensuing hours of April 15, 2020, receiving life-saving surgery.
She has had many surgeries since and still has some to go, and, for the moment, she is unable to practice her profession, which she said she loved. She became a nurse more than 16 years ago because she wanted to provide compassionate help to those who are suffering and dying, she said.
The nurse (the Mirror does not use names of assault victims) told her story while about 20 of her friends and colleagues sat in an otherwise empty courtroom watching the hearing by video conference.
The hearing was to determine whether Watson, although now only 16-years-old, should be tried as an adult, exposing him to time in a state correctional institution, or as a juvenile, which could mean spending time in a secure juvenile treatment center until he is 21 years old.
He faces charges of attempted homicide, two counts of aggravated assault, recklessly endangering another person and tampering with evidence.
The latter charge stemmed from his attempts to hide the knife in the woods and hide his clothes that were bloodied during the attack.
Watson's attorney, Michael Emerick, a Blair County Assistant Public Defender, has the legal burden of demonstrating that Watson's case should be transferred to the juvenile court.
He presented a clinical psychologist, Nancy Miller from Allentown, who testified the teen at present is a risk to the community, but Miller concluded that the teen and the community would be better served by placing him in a secure facility where he would receive anger management and other therapies that would enable him to learn to control his behavior.
"He needs to be taught skills to function in society," she said, pointing out that he will someday be released from custody.
She said he was amenable to treatment and noted, "he would fare better having treatment while he is incarcerated."
She speculated that he may suffer from a mental health condition, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, which, she admitted to Blair County District Attorney Pete Weeks, is a condition that will take a long time to get under control.
First Assistant District Attorney Nicole Smith presented an expert witness to counter the defense request for decertification to juvenile court.
Dr. Barbara Ziv, a forensic psychiatrist from Temple University, emphasized the teen's underlying condition cannot be treated in either a juvenile or adult institution.
Ziv was not confident that anger management or attempts at instilling impulse control in Watson would work, and she said that she did not believe he would change by age 21, the age when permitted to leave the juvenile system.
Testimony from defense witnesses indicated that Watson was "a good kid" and was not a behavioral problem in school. Weeks, however, pointed out that he admitted to getting into 10 fights as a teenager, and that he once used a baseball bat to break another person's jaw.
Weeks maintained that Watson's unexplained attack of the nurse last April was a symptom of his increasing tendency toward extreme violence.
The nurse was called to the grandfather's home because he had reportedly fallen that day and struck his head.
The grandfather, who suffered from multiple medical problems, was checked out by the nurse and had no apparent after-effects from the fall.
As for the nurse, she said she would be concerned about visiting a patient's home in the future.
"I see the attack. ... It's always there," she said in her testimony.