Police: Man wields tree limb as weapon during fight over a love interest

A Key West homeless man was jailed Monday after police said he knocked a man out cold with a tree limb for having kissed his girlfriend.

“I was going to take his f---ing head off,” Calvin Jackson, 69, reportedly told police officers about his clash with Wayne Lee Golden, 38, who is also homeless. “He lucky.”

Jackson faces a felony battery charge for allegedly using what police deemed a deadly weapon — a large tree limb, according to a witness — that left part of Golden’s head swollen. Jackson remained in the Stock Island jail Tuesday without bond.

Golden refused medical treatment and asked officers to leave both him and Jackson alone, police reported.

But Golden did identify Jackson as the man he knew only in passing who hit him with “a stick,” which was backed up by two witnesses — a third homeless man and a man who told police he watched from his car in the parking lot as Jackson wielded a weapon on another man.

Police tried to find the stick in question but said the wooded area beside Home Depot where Jackson said he tossed it “was filled with sticks of a similar size and length.”

Jackson, appearing angry, walked across the parking lot carrying “a large stick,” the 30-year-old man in the car told police, and struck Golden in the head, “causing him to go unconscious,” Officer Thomas Stutz wrote in his report. The fight happened about 4 p.m. Monday outside the Home Depot, 2811 N. Roosevelt Boulevard.

Jackson told police he only used his hands on Golden but picked up a stick “and was going to continue beating him but decided not to,” the arrest report states. Jackson said Golden had walked up to him and kissed his girlfriend and called him a racial slur. Jackson is black and Golden is white.

“I came back and took care of my business,” police say Jackson explained. “Never disrespect my woman.”

This story was originally published July 27, 2016 at 10:17 AM with the headline "Police: Man wields tree limb as weapon during fight over a love interest."