A Mountain Home man, who has been in trouble for violent attacks against people both inside and outside the county jail, has been found not guilty of criminal charges filed against him by reason of mental disease or defect.The finding was announced by Judge Gordon Webb during a session of Baxter County Circuit Court Thursday.
Twenty-three-year-old Blaze Logan Forrester is confined to the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock, according to 14th Judicial District Prosecuting Attorney David Ethredge.
In late October last year, Forrester was alleged to have attacked the nurse at the Baxter County Detention Center as she was making rounds dispensing medications. Forrester was reported to have reached through the food service port in his cell door and struck the nurse, who was almost six months pregnant, in the abdomen while grabbing at her clothing.
Forrester is alleged to have made statements such as “I hope your baby dies” and “I am going to kill your baby.” He was charged with second-degree battery and terroristic threatening stemming from the attack on the nurse.
At the time he struck the nurse, Forrester had already been found mentally not-fit-to-proceed in three earlier cases filed against him, and the court had ordered him into the custody of the Department of Human Services.
Forrester had been sitting in the Baxter County jail for months waiting on DHS to move him into a more suitable facility to undergo court-ordered psychiatric treatment. Ethredge said at the time the county jail “was not the place to confine people with significant mental problems.” He said the fact Forrester had been in the local lockup for such a long time waiting for DHS to move him to a treatment facility “is totally unacceptable. It represents a real threat to the jail staff and Forrester himself.”
A court order was issued Nov. 1st last year by Judge Webb ordering DHS to remove Forrester from the county jail within 72 hours.
Forrester was also charged with punching a male jailer who was moving him from one area of the jail to another for his own protection. Inmates had threatened to beat Forrester because he was reported to be spitting on the floor. The Mountain Home man was finally brought under control, when jail staff used a stun gun to subdue him.
Forrester’s run-ins with the law began in late May 2017 when he attacked his grandfather after allegedly becoming irate when his older relative told him to put a shirt on before going outside. The grandfather said Forrester repeatedly punched him in the face and head. When the grandfather came to the Mountain Home Police Department to report the incident, he was bleeding from a cut over his left eye and left hand. The grandfather told investigators he did not believe his grandson was ever going to stop hitting him.
When police officers talked to Forrester, he admitted he had become angry with his grandfather and had struck his relative several times.
In mid December 2017, Forrester was arrested yet again for attacking a female outside a local movie theater and less than a half-hour later leaning into a vehicle waiting in line at the drive thru of a local fast food restaurant and striking an occupant.
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