Plea deal reached in bleach assault

A judge accepted a plea deal involving a Springfield man who police said sent a woman to the hospital in August with a cigarette burn on her back after he repeatedly dunked her head in a bucket of bleach during a drunken argument.

www.rutlandherald.com

Published January 18, 2016 in the Rutland Herald Plea deal reached in bleach assault By ERIC FRANCIS CORRESPONDENT WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A judge accepted a plea deal involving a Springfield man who police said sent a woman to the hospital in August with a cigarette burn on her back after he repeatedly dunked her head in a bucket of bleach during a drunken argument. Robert Smart, 53, pleaded guilty last week to both felony and misdemeanor counts of domestic assault and admitted violating a court-ordered condition of pre-trial release by having contact with his victim, a move that had put him behind bars since October. Judge Theresa DiMauro had expressed disappointment from the bench that the agreement negotiated between Smart’s defense and the state specified that Smart, who had originally been facing up to 22 years, be released last Tuesday after having spent just 70 days in jail. Windsor County Deputy State’s Attorney Heidi Remick responded by saying that while she “in no way” wanted to sound as though she was blaming Smart’s ex-girlfriend, “(the victim) has not been very cooperative and has her own issues with sobriety.” At the time of Smart’s original arrest in August, Springfield Police Officer Jeremy Fitzgibbons wrote in an affidavit that the victim “frequently reported assaults” by Smart but, “has a history of not wanting to file a report, filing a report and soon after recanting it, or being too intoxicated to provide accurate information.” Fitzgibbons said that on the morning he interviewed the bloodied victim in her hospital bed she told him that Smart had allegedly, “struck her in the face, hit and kicked her in the back and ribs, put out a cigarette on her back, ripped off her clothes, and had dunked her head in a mop bucket of bleach over the course of the incident.” She described the assault, saying that her head was completely under the liquid for up to 10 seconds at a time. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she wrote in a sworn written statement, adding “I was in fear of my life. No matter what I did, he wouldn’t stop.” When asked to rate the level of pain on a scale of 1 to 10, Fitzgibbons wrote the woman replied that it had been “an 11.” Fitzgibbons added that emergency room personnel told police that they when they looked over the victim’s X-rays they spotted “numerous fractures to her ribs and to bones in her face” but determined that “they were old” and not part of anything that had transpired that day.