OKLAHOMA CITY – A Native American from Duncan who has three prior state convictions faces trial next month on federal charges of assaulting a woman with a knife and intimidating her to prevent her from testifying against him.
Ryan Everett O’Neal, 29, remains in federal custody pending trial, court records indicate.
The charges arose from an alleged incident near Velma on March 19, 2020.
Shortly before 1 p.m. that day Stephens County Deputy Sheriff Robbie Blackford received a report that a woman was running on Stephens County Road 1790 in front of a car and was yelling for help. Blackford, in Duncan at the time, advised the dispatcher to notify the Velma Police Department, which was closer to the scene; County Road 1790 is an east/west route two miles south of Velma.
At 1:05 p.m., Blackford reported, he heard a Velma police officer “telling a subject to get on the ground,” and the officer advised the deputy that he had detained a male “and a female is needing medical attention.”
The officer said that upon his arrival at the scene, Whitney Perkins, 36, got out of the automobile, yelling, “Help me! Get him away from me!” She had a knife in her hands while running toward the police vehicle “and jumped in the front seat,” the officer said.
The man who was detained, O’Neal, said he and Perkins were arguing “a little bit, but nothing physical,” Blackford reported. However, when Blackford opened the driver’s side door to shut off the car’s engine, “I noticed blood all over the interior of the vehicle and the front windshield was busted.”
An ambulance transported Perkins to Duncan Regional Hospital. Blackford said that when he and another deputy interviewed her at the hospital, her shirt was “ripped and barely hanging on her shoulders, she had marks on her neck matching fingers, she had a black eye, her right arm had bruises from her shoulder down to her wrist, and she had a bite mark on her left shoulder.”
Also, while viewing dash cam footage from the Velma police cruiser, “We could hear the female yelling, ‘He was going to kill me. He told me he was going to kill me.’ She repeated herself multiple times.”
The next day Stephens County Assistant District Attorney Cortnie Siess charged O’Neal with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon after former conviction of a felony. However, that charge was dismissed April 1, 2021, along with a separate felony count accusing O’Neal of damaging a window in a cell at the Stephens County Jail.
The charges were dropped after O’Neal filed a McGirt-related application in which he claimed the Stephens County court lacked jurisdiction: He is a citizen of the Caddo Nation and was arrested approximately six miles southwest of Velma near an intersection that is inside the boundaries of the Chickasaw Nation.
Subsequently O’Neal was indicted May 4, 2021, in the Western District federal court in Oklahoma City.
The indictment was the second time in less than two years that O’Neal was charged with attacking someone with a knife.
He was charged in Stephens County on June 14, 2019, with using a knife to stab a man just below the left armpit on Dec. 16, 2018, outside a Duncan convenience store. However, that charge, battery with a dangerous weapon, was dismissed four and a half months later because the victim was “uncooperative,” District Attorney Jason Hicks reported.
The alleged knife attack occurred less than a week after O’Neal was released from prison after serving three years and three months for a 2015 second-degree burglary conviction from Stephens County.
The Rush Springs Police Department arrested O’Neal in July 2019 for auto theft, but the case was dismissed eight months later. No explanation for the dismissal was provided in Grady County District Court records.
O’Neal was charged with two counts of distribution of methamphetamine in Stephens County in 2011. He pleaded guilty a year later and received two concurrent 10-year suspended prison sentences. The suspended sentence was revoked in 2015 after his burglary conviction, court records reflect.
Also, that year O’Neal pleaded “no contest” in LeFlore County District Court to escaping after his arrest by the Poteau Police Department. He received a one year suspended county jail sentence.