EAST COUNTY COURTS – “Calm down, ninja warrior.”
With those words, Steven Michael Lowe said, he confronted a sword-wielding man dressed in tan who had appeared above him on an embankment along Santa Maria Creek near Montecito Road in Ramona.
The man Lowe identified in court as his assailant, Andrew Nicholas Griffith, 28, also is charged with murder in the shooting of a Kmart security guard in a confrontation a month later.
“At first, I didn't take him seriously, I thought he was kidding around,” Lowe testified yesterday in El Cajon Superior Court.
But Griffith charged, waving a 3-foot-long samurai sword, Lowe said.
Lowe said he grabbed a fallen tree limb from the ground to protect himself, but Griffith slashed through it. As he turned to run, he said he felt pressure on his upper left arm, “like I'd been punched.”
Looking down, Lowe said he saw his arm covered in blood from a gash that later required 18 stitches.
Griffith must stand trial on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and battery causing great bodily injury, Judge Herbert J. Exarhos ruled yesterday.
Griffith is being held in jail without bail, pending a March 10 trial on charges of murder, attempted murder, robbery and other felonies in connection with the July 21 fatal shooting of David Busby II, a Navy sailor who was working as a Kmart security guard in Ramona to help support his wife and toddler son.
Police tied Griffith to the sword attack while investigating the Busby slaying, Deputy District Attorney Gordon Paul Davis said.
Sheriff's deputies testified yesterday that they found the sword Lowe described in a truck Griffith had been driving at the time of the Kmart shooting.
Lowe, who was jailed for parole violations after the June attack, said he recognized Griffith as his attacker when the two were confined in nearby cells in the jail in downtown San Diego.
“He was in the cell, like two doors down from me,” Lowe testified. “It was kind of incredible circumstances.”
Ray Huard: (619) 542-4597; ray.huard@uniontrib.com
