A St. Mary’s teenage girl has been sentenced to serve 18 months in jail following her guilty plea to first-degree assault in connection with a knife attack on a woman last winter at a grocery in Lexington Park.

Keana Marie Biscoe, now 17, told her judge at a juvenile waiver hearing and a probation agent preparing a presentence investigation report that she did not remember the Jan. 10 incident at the Food Lion in the St. Mary’s Square shopping center, a prosecutor said at last week’s sentencing proceeding.

“She needs to remember,” St. Mary’s Assistant State’s Attorney John Pleisse said. “She needs to think about it, ... what a terrible act it was.”

Biscoe was arrested and charged as an adult on original district court papers alleging that Amanda Marie Parks of Lexington Park suffered four stab wounds in her stomach, two in her head and two in her back. Parks also suffered an eye injury when she was struck with a candle, according to court papers, and Michael Scott Burke, an employee at the grocery, was stabbed in the buttocks as he tried to help the injured woman.

Parks was flown to a hospital for treatment of her injuries, St. Mary’s sheriff’s deputies reported after the incident, and Burke was taken by ambulance to a hospital to be treated for his injuries.

St. Mary’s Circuit Judge Michael J. Stamm viewed a brief video of the crime in his chambers during a court recess, before he sentenced Biscoe.“You went out of your way to keep that woman from leaving [the store], and you stabbed her multiple times. You then stabbed an employee who tried to break that up,” Stamm said. “You tell us that you don’t remember any of that.”

Moments earlier in the proceeding, Biscoe said, “I want to say that I apologize for my actions,” and assured the judge that a situation like that “will never happen again.”

Luke Woods, Biscoe’s public defender, said during the hearing that his client at one time “was on the road to a really great life” including serving in high school as a tutor and submitting after-school proposals to the U.S. Congress. “Then we have this awful event that happened last January,” Woods said, recalling the girl’s eventual recognition of what she had done. “The first day I met her,” the lawyer said, “she was in shock. Finally, she broke down in my office [with] remorse and contrition.”

Stamm sentenced Biscoe to eight years in state prison, suspended to the 18-month jail term with work-release privileges, on the condition that she pay $2,199 in restitution and participate in any recommended counseling during five years of supervised probation.

The judge noted that Biscoe has a child of her own, and that if the teenager violates the terms of her probation, “You think about missing six-and-a-half years of that child’s life.”

Stamm also noted how narrowly the injured woman escaped being killed by the stab wounds. “You would be standing in front of me for murder today,” he said to Biscoe.

Two younger girls, age 13 and 15, who were accompanying Biscoe, also were arrested through the investigation, and charges against them were resolved in February in juvenile court.

The prosecutor said before Biscoe’s plea hearing last spring that one of the younger girls was conversing with a boyfriend of Parks, before Parks said that it was time for her and the boyfriend to leave the store.

House hitter released

In earlier court proceedings, Timothy Scott Hancock, 34, of Mechanicsville pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree assault from an incident last March near Leonardtown where charging papers allege he repeatedly struck his wife’s home with a pickup truck.

Hancock, who also pleaded guilty to violating a protective order, was sentenced in district court at this month’s plea hearing to three years in custody, suspended to 134 days served in pretrial custody on the condition that he enroll in a residential counseling program and a longer halfway house program and participate in additional recommended evaluations during three years of supervised probation.

Law officers filed court papers stating that Hancock struck the residence with the truck after the protective order had been issued that he stay away from the home, where Angela Nanette Hancock and their three children were sleeping. Jens Richard Jacobsen Jr., her father, told police that he was sitting in the living room when he heard a security alarm in the driveway, court papers state, before Hancock twice backed the truck into the woman’s sport-utility vehicle and then struck the residence with the front of the truck two times.

Hancock at one time entered a plea of not being criminally responsible for his alleged actions. Prosecutors dropped charges of attempted first-degree assault, property destruction and trespassing.

jwharton@somdnews.com