A 36-year-old man charged with stabbing two people last week in Portland attacked the couple as they slept under a highway overpass in a dispute over rent money, court records show.

Scott Decker of Portland faces two counts of elevated aggravated assault in connection with the May 1 incident. He was ordered held in lieu of $20,000 bail, according to court records filed in Cumberland County Unified Criminal Court, and is locked up in the Cumberland County Jail.

The victims, a 43-year-old man and his 29-year-old girlfriend, were lying together on a mattress pad under the Deering Avenue overpass near Fitzpatrick Stadium when Decker and a woman approached the couple and demanded repayment. Decker then stabbed each victim once in the side, according to the documents.

After the alleged attack, Decker and his girlfriend fled toward Deering Oaks.

The female victim told police that she and her boyfriend lived together at an Oxford Street apartment. Decker and his girlfriend moved into the unit in March.

The woman told police that the dispute began when she wrote a $2,000 check to Decker to pay for rent, but the check bounced, and Decker and his girlfriend had been looking for them to recoup the money.

The female victim told police her living situation changed abruptly in early April, when she was hospitalized for nearly two weeks. When she returned to her Oxford Street apartment, she found that Decker had evicted her from her own unit and claimed “squatter’s rights,” despite the fact that she was the only person listed on the unit’s lease, the woman told police.

The female victim’s boyfriend stayed in the unit while his girlfriend was in the hospital, but gave up his tenancy when she returned and began sleeping under the overpass, where he had been sleeping before moving into the Oxford Street unit, she told officers.

The woman also alleged that Decker threatened her before she left the apartment, but she did not take the threats seriously.

Police arrested Decker at the woman’s Oxford Street apartment a short time later.

 

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