- November 17, 2024
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A 34-year-old Palm Coast man told deputies he was smashed in the face with what looked like a metal baseball bat in the early morning hours of May 9 while dropping a friend off at her home.
The victim, Christopher Lee Penwell, was treated at Florida Hospital Flagler after he “sustained several facial fractures,” according to a Flagler County Sheriff’s Office Commander’s Log entry.
Deputy Sam Bell spoke to Penwell at the hospital at about 2:25 a.m. Penwell said the attack happened some time after midnight.
He’d spent the evening watching a movie at his Bayside Drive house with Susan Paulsen, a 46-year-old resident of Burning Wick Place, then drove her to her house so she could let her dogs out, he told the deputy.
As he got out of the car in the driveway, “he heard what sounded like a branch break and looked behind him,” then “saw the flash of what looked like a metal bat as it smashed into the left side of his face,” according to Bell’s report.
Penwell fell, and the black-clad assailant hit him again — this time on the other side of his head — then ran away, he told the deputy.
Paulsen drove him to the hospital.
In an interview with Bell, “Paulsen stated that her son David Paulsen was in a fight with some gang members last Saturday and she thinks this attack was meant for David, as retaliation,” according to the deputy’s report.
Paulsen’s Burning Wick Place home was the scene of police activity twice within one weekend last month.
On Friday, April 17, according to Sheriff’s Office records, 18-year-old Dylan Michael Alves accidentally shot himself in the leg with a gun Paulsen told deputies Alves’ had said he found.
Two days later, on Sunday, April 19, deputies were called out to the same house when a 911 caller said they saw about 20 people fighting behind the home.
Witnesses who spoke with a deputy “advised that two males agreed to fight at the residence, and they came to watch the fight,” according to a Sheriff’s Office report.
