A Summerfield man with a long history of battery arrests is behind bars in the Marion County Jail after a nasty scuffle with a gal pal just outside the walls of The Villages.
The battle broke out late Wednesday afternoon in the 7300 block of SE Hwy. 42. Two Marion County sheriff’s deputies who were leaving another call drove up on the incident and reported two men and a woman involved in what appeared to be a physical confrontation.
The woman told deputies she had been driving east on Hwy. 42 when she spotted 57-year-old Vincent Ray Simmons heading in the opposite direction. She said she made a U-turn and Simmons motioned for her to pull over.
The woman said she recognized bricks from her residence in the back of Simmons’ vehicle and asked why he took them from her. She said Simmons started throwing the bricks out of the vehicle when he was asked to return them, a sheriff’s office report states.
During the argument, the woman said, Simmons got into the driver’s seat of his vehicle and the tiff continued while she was standing nearby on the passenger side. She said she accidentally dropped her cigarette lighter into the passenger seat and as she was attempting to retrieve it, Simmons pulled her into the vehicle by her wrists, the report states.
Deputies reported seeing Simmons accelerate forward as the woman fell into the vehicle. She hit the left side of her face on the center console and suffered a slight redness under her left eye and a scrape on her left forearm, the report says.
Simmons was taken into custody and transported to the Marion County Jail, where he was charged with domestic battery (second or subsequent offense). He was being held on no bond and is due in court May 5 at 9 a.m. to answer to the charge.
Simmons is no stranger to the legal system, having been convicted of battery in September 2002 in a Leesburg case. Between January 2010 and December 2019, he also was arrested four times on the same charge in Marion County, jail records show.
The December arrest stemmed from an alleged battery with a woman who didn’t want him taking scrap metal from her yard. At the time, he was living in a camper on the woman’s property, a sheriff’s office report says.
