Two arrests have been made for the assault of an East Redding convenience store clerk. Shortly before 6 O’clock Monday morning Redding Police were called to the Circle K at Hartnell and Churn Creek. A man and a teenage girl had come in to the store together and one of them shoplifted. When the girl was confronted by the clerk she dropped her cell phone, which the clerk picked up before calling 9-1-1. That’s when the man became violent as he demanded the return of the cell phone while calling the clerk racial slurs. He repeatedly walked outside to his vehicle to retrieve weapons that he used to damage the store and attack the clerk, who armed himself with a baseball bat. The suspect’s weapons included a crow bar, a folding knife, a chain saw and the store’s fire extinguisher, which he threw at the clerk, striking him on the head. The clerk suffered a traumatic head injury from the attack. The suspects were gone when police arrived but through an investigation based on surveillance images, a 15-year-old girl was arrested at a home on First Street in Cottonwood later in the day and 21-year-old Stephen Matthew Ooms of Bella Vista was arrested by Anderson Police. The girl was booked into Juvenile Haall and Ooms is in Shasta County Jail on $50,000 bail on charges including assault with a deadly weapon and a hate crime.
-Steve Gibson