Survivor of beheading attempt describes 2014 attack for jury
Staff Writer nclay@oklahoman.com
NORMAN — The survivor of a beheading attempt told jurors Monday she fought with her attacker, screaming for help as he sliced at her neck with a bloody knife.
“He wouldn’t stop,” Traci Johnson, 46, said of the assault at a Moore food plant on Sept. 25, 2014. “He was just going back and forth like he was cutting a piece of meat.”
She identified her attacker as murder defendant Alton Alexander Nolen, who had just been suspended from his job at Vaughan Foods.
“I didn’t know what to do or think,” she said. “I was trying to get him off of me and he wouldn’t get off.”
Nolen, 33, of Moore, is accused of beheading one coworker, Colleen Hufford, and attempting to behead Johnson. She was saved when the company’s then-chief operating officer, Mark Vaughan, interrupted the attack, according to testimony Monday.
The testimony from Johnson marked the first time since the assault she has been near Nolen. A prosecutor held her hand as she walked to the witness stand. She glanced at Nolen with apprehension as she testified.
Nolen sat with his head
down, his eyes closed and his fingers in his ears, as he has for every witness so far.
“I know you’re very nervous, and that’s OK,” District Judge Lori Walkley told Johnson.
“Sorry, this is rough,” Johnson said at one point in her testimony.
Jurors saw photos of her injuries — cuts to the right side of her neck, to her face and to a finger. She told jurors she had to have surgery to repair damage to her jugular vein.
Nolen was suspended because Johnson reported to a supervisor a racial remark he had made while they were side by side on an assembly line for the making and packaging of bruschetta, according to testimony from several witnesses.
Johnson had worked at the plant only four days. She and others had complained that he wasn’t stirring the product enough, according to testimony. Monday’s first witness, Jeremy Hartman, described the incident as a “heated argument.”
Johnson told jurors Nolen kept “nagging and nagging and nagging” at her that afternoon. She said she told him that he was “nothing but a spoiled brat and lazy.”
She testified that “all of a sudden” Nolen said “I hate white people. I beat white people up.” She said she was enraged by the remark, went to a supervisor to report him and started bawling.
Nolen wrote out a statement for a plant supervisor about the argument. He admitted he had said “I beat on Caucasians.” Jurors were shown the statement Monday.
In the statement, Nolen wrote that he told “the white lady” that there was no need to stir the bruschetta again and “to tone her voice.”
He also wrote that he told her that he was 30 and not one of her kids. He wrote that she called him an immature brat and he kind of laughed about it in a way of blowing the comment off.
He wrote that five or 10 minutes later he heard Johnson say to the black woman on the line that he got Caucasians f----- up. He wrote that he then told the black woman that he beat on Caucasians.
He added the word “Gentiles” in parenthesis each time he wrote “Caucasians” and “Gentile” in parenthesis after writing “the white lady.”
At the end of his statement, using incorrect grammar, he wrote: “Im an Muslim + my religion come before anything!”
Johnson testified she had
been leaving for the day when she heard screaming. She said she discovered that Hufford had been attacked. She said she had planned to sit with Hufford until an ambulance arrived. She said Nolen saw her, though, and made a mad dash toward her.
She said she froze. Her supervisor, Tim Bluford, told jurors he saw Nolen on Johnson’s back after hearing her scream for help. Bluford said he hurled a row of food labels at Nolen’s head but missed. He said Nolen then charged at him.
Vaughan also saw Nolen charging down a long hallway. Vaughan, a reserve Oklahoma County sheriff’s deputy, testified Monday he fired his rifle three times, stopping Nolen.
Defense attorneys have acknowledged to jurors that Nolen was the
attacker. They contend, though, he is not guilty by reason of insanity.
The attorneys have said he believes he was “100 percent right” in his actions because of delusional misinterpretations of Islamic teachings. Nolen is not cooperating with that defense.
The former human resources worker who suspended Nolen sobbed Monday in court. She revealed in her testimony that Nolen actually had resigned after she told him he was being suspended pending investigation.
“I had done this a million times,” Latosha Davis said of his suspension. “I followed the rules.”
She also said, “Alton was strange.”
The trial began Sept. 8 and could last another month. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.