Mankato Avenue. Police were called about 2:30 a.m. to an apartment in the recent-vintage complex down the street from the big-box Target store.

Victim survives blows with vodka bottle, baton

WINONA, Minn. – Police received a frantic call from a woman in a parking lot outside a Mankato Avenue apartment building that a brutal fight was going on inside. Police found a bloodied but coherent man in the apartment and took him down the street to the Winona hospital. Doctors in the emergency room patched him up. The man said he had been struck over the head five or six times with a vodka bottle in an argument and then clubbed with a taser device. The assailant, according to the victim, didn’t fire the taser but swung it at him like a baton. At the scene police arrested Matthew Zachary Manka, 29, of Winona. Manka was drunk, they said. He was booked for domestic assault.

The guest brings home a guest

The victim, who is 63, and his wife, 61, rent the apartment where the attack occurred. Manka, no relation, had been living with them about a year, the husband and wife told police. They gave this account: Without their permission or even advance word, and very drunk Manka brought a woman home. An argument ensued. As both women watched, Manka picked up a bottle of Kentucky-distilled distilled Sea Ice vodka and beat the husband repeatedly. Manka then picked up a baton of some sort and raised it as if to strike the husband. Whether the baton made contact was not clear to either woman amid the confusion and mayhem. In any event, Manta’s woman friend fled and called police.

Blood as evidence of violence

When police arrived, the apartment entry was splotched with blood. The husband was bleeding from wounds on the left side of hie face. Neither his wife nor Manka’s guest was injured. At the jailhouse Manka was booked and behind bars by 5:30.

 

Manka. Because of a previous domestic assault conviction, the booking charge was elevated to gross misdemeanor.