PORT ANGELES — An arraignment is set today for a 41-year-old man who allegedly shattered a cab driver’s window with an opened knife and almost hit the cab driver in the face.
Michael Wayne Oxendine, whose address was listed as unknown in charging documents filed in Clallam County Superior Court, was charged last week with one count of second-degree assault stemming from an alleged early-morning
Dec. 21 encounter with a driver for Blue Top Cab near Bar N9ne Pizzeria & Lounge in the 200 block of West First Street.
Oxendine is being held in the Clallam County jail on $25,000 bond. He is scheduled to be arraigned at 9 a.m. today in Clallam County Superior Court.
A Port Angeles Police Department report gave this account:
Police arrived in the 200 block of West First Street at about 2 a.m. Dec. 21 after the cab driver called 9-1-1 to say that his fare, later identified as Oxendine, had threatened him with a knife.
The cabbie told police he picked Oxendine up outside Bar N9ne just before he called them.
The driver said that Oxendine was so intoxicated that the driver could not understand where he wanted to be taken.
The driver told police he began driving the direction he thought Oxendine wanted to go, but Oxendine soon began to get agitated and belligerent.
The driver stopped the car and told Oxendine, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, to get out of the cab.
Oxendine obliged, but not before reaching back and slapping the driver in the face, the driver told police.
The driver got out to confront Oxendine, who the driver said then pulled a knife and approached the driver by walking around the back of the cab.
After the driver got back into the driver’s seat, Oxendine lunged at the driver’s side door, punched it and kicked it, all while holding the knife with its blade open, the driver told police.
After shattering the front driver’s side door window and almost hitting the driver in the face, Oxendine left the scene, the driver told police.
Oxendine told police he had been involved in a fight at Bar N9ne and that someone had called a cab for him.
Oxendine told police he did get angry at the driver because he thought the driver was taking the long way to Oxendine’s desired destination, but he denied having a knife and denied the cuts on his arm had been sustained by the broken car window glass.
Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.
