by Barak Fravasi
During a mid-afternoon fit of violence that the local newspaper described as a dispute with his wife, an unemployed health care worker from Pawtucket, who was in fact a 43 year-old man formerly employed at the Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket although he resided in Rumford, began carefully dividing the couple’s belongings with a chainsaw, and when this procedure turned into the mere destruction of the couple’s belongings, something the husband claimed to have recognized after perhaps twenty minutes, according to the arresting officer, he began smashing objects with the chainsaw and with his boots as well, destroying the large flat-panel television and a glass tabletop in this manner. The bedroom set destroyed by the husband, described in the police report as a chest of drawers cut in half and a bed sawed down the middle with its four posts cut off, was valued at $4500 by the man’s wife, who escaped being physically harmed by ducking a drill press thrown at her by the enraged husband, who had followed her into the basement of the house, the wife having reacted to the destruction of the contents of the living room by rushing to the basement where the couple kept a second television, both of them knowing somehow that she would try to protect the second television whatever the consequences, according to the police. The officers arrested the unemployed worker and took him to the police station, which served as the local courthouse as well, where he was arraigned and released on $250 bail, exactly 18% of the estimated value of the destroyed bedroom set, the newspaper noted.