Man stabbed at Budds Creek speedway charged with earlier assault

Alleged attack on boy preceded knife injury

Friday, Aug. 28, 2009

Adam Edward Layman, a 21-year-old Baltimore County resident who was hospitalized for two days after the knife attack, is accused in a charges application of earlier spitting on a Calvert County teenager, grabbing him by the neck and punching him in the face.

Another Calvert County teenager, a 15-year-old Chesapeake Beach boy, remains in custody at a state juvenile facility after a court hearing Monday on a charge of committing a first-degree assault on Layman at Potomac Speedway.

The stabbing occurred shortly after 11 p.m. last Friday, officials report, and a charges application filed Wednesday by Matthew Francis Niland at the court commissioner's office in Leonardtown alleges that Layman earlier approached him as he was talking to a girl.

"He was falling on me so I asked him to back up, and he spit on me and he said, ‘I'll knock your punk ass out in three seconds,'" Niland wrote in the charges application. "So I told him to do it."

Niland wrote in the charges application that Layman spit on him again and pushed him, before Niland pushed him back, and that Layman grabbed him by the neck and punched him in the face.

"I hit him in the face back, just trying to defend myself, and he fell," Niland wrote. "I hit him two more times when he was on the ground."

Niland wrote that someone pulled him off of Layman, the charges application states, before an unidentified "adult friend" of Layman choked Niland. "Then I just walked away," Niland wrote.

Charles Niland, the boy's father, said the attack on his 16-year-old son occurred no more than five to 10 minutes before the separate incident that left Layman injured.

"Layman started the whole sequence of events," the boy's father said. "It was all in the same general area, within 50 feet of each other."

Layman, who could not be reached for comment Thursday on the misdemeanor charge filed against him, said earlier this week that he was next to a friend's mobile home at the camping site when he told some boys involved in a disturbance to leave and that he fell down before he was injured.

John McKenna, a lawyer for the teenager charged with assaulting Layman, said Monday in court that there are self-defense issues in the police report related to his client's arrest.

The speedway property's owner said this week that the facility hires a large security staff.

jwharton@somdnews.com