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published author new to Oriental bit a local man who was helping her move in on Saturday afternoon, while the town’s annual Croakerfest was underway.

Katherine “Kit” Kimberly was charged with simple assault, assault with a deadly weapon, resisting an officer and possession of marijuana paraphernalia, according to Investigator Jeremy Lee with the Pamlico County Sheriff’s Office.

At about 5pm — a few hours after the parade passed—Kimberly bit Gavin McClung on his arms and slashed his hand with a serrated kitchen knife in an altercation at the house Kimberly had recently acquired on Hodges Street.

The yellow house on Hodges Street.

McClung had been repairing and renovating the house for its previous owner. On Saturday, he used his truck to help Kimberly move a fridge, which she bought at Picker’s, to her house. McClung said the fridge was heavy, and after he (and one other friend named Dan) were unable to move it, Kit Kimberly took the knife from her kitchen and threatened to slash his tires if the two men didn’t move it into her house.

When the situation became tense, McClung began recording with his phone:

Video provided by Gavin McClung.

McClung said he called her crazy and that she was “rambling nonsense,” comparing him to Donald Trump and saying he would mistreat women.

“You could tell she had had some stuff prior,” McClung said. “It wasn’t really about me; she was just putting a bunch of stuff on it.”

Gavin McClung with his dog Scout at the Bean.

McClung said Kimberly took a saddle out of his truck and said she’d keep it until they finished unloading the fridge. McClung approached Kimberly for the saddle.

“I put my arms around her—because she has the saddle in front of her—to get the saddle, and she just started stabbing right behind her without looking. She was that close to my eye,” McClung said. After that Kimberly went back into the house.

The Sheriff’s Dept arrived at about 5:10p. Kimberly was arrested and is currently out on a $1,000 secured bond.

McClung went to the MERCI Clinic in New Bern for treatment.

“(The medical staff said) you’re obviously going to want antibiotics because it’s a human mouth, and they’re gross, but I didn’t need surgery or anything like that.” McClung said. “It’s healing up. It was really bad for a time—like goopy. But now it’s starting to scab.”

A closeup of the bite mark on McClung’s arm.

Kimberly told TownDock.net she was only defending herself.

“I was attacked on my own property, and I defended myself,” Kimberly said. “And the police threw me in the car without ever telling me I was under arrest. They didn’t Mirandize me. They didn’t tell me what the charge was.”

She said she only bit McClung because he was restraining her.

“How the &@%* do the police think those bites got on him?” Kimberly said. “What do they think he came up to me and put his arm in my mouth? I bit him because he was holding me down.”

Kimberly declined to answer further questions about the incident.

Kit Kimberly published a novel “The Last Bohemians” in 2013 and wrote a blog called “The Peripatetic Bohemian.” Her biography on the e-book distributor Smashwords described her as a “journalist, writing teacher and coordinator for NGOs” and as a “habitually peripatetic” traveler. She’s lived in Prague, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand.

“I’m not optimistic about living here [in Oriental],” Kimberly said. “Probably I’m just going to leave this house as a rental property because I don’t want to live in a town where the police arrest the woman who was attacked rather than the guy who did the attacking.”

Kimberly said on Wednesday she would be leaving the country the following day.

“Basically this is going to be the most expensive refrigerator ever in the history of Oriental,” Kimberly said.

Posted Thursday July 6, 2017 by Christopher Mcdermott