A man involved in a violent incident that led to an eight-year-old child being stabbed was ordered to remain in custody on Friday as legal proceedings advance.

At 25 years old, Henry Carr was present in court before Judge Brett Olmstead for a second hearing. Although Carr was arraigned on Thursday, the decision about his pretrial detention was deferred to the next day. During the hearing, both sides presented their arguments regarding whether Carr should stay detained.

Judge Olmstead needed convincing evidence to determine Carr’s involvement in the alleged crimes, not conclusive proof. The judge concluded that the presented evidence substantiated the allegations and demonstrated that Carr posed a continuing threat, with no release conditions sufficient to alleviate this danger. As a result, Carr was ordered to remain in custody.

Arguing for detention, Assistant State’s Attorney Joel Fletcher described the events that happened on Tuesday, saying that the domestic violence started due to Carr’s misplaced ID card. Saying that Carr “got mad at (his girlfriend),” Fletcher accused Carr of punching her and hitting her with a wooden slat taken from her sons’ bunk bed.

The boys, ages seven and eight, ran over to defend their mother, Fletcher said, and started hitting Carr. He then allegedly grabbed a steak knife and started swinging it around, eventually slashing the eight-year-old in the abdomen with it.

The victim suffered a large wound to his stomach that required an airlift to Carle Hospital and open surgery to repair damage to his intestines. He is expected to survive, but the victim was still hospitalized during the detention hearing, and police said he has a long road to recovery ahead.

Fletcher said officers interviewed both boys and their mother, who all identified Carr as the person responsible for the victim’s injury. Bystanders also blamed Carr and pointed officers to the apartment complex’s courtyard, where officers found Carr. He tried to run, which Judge Olmstead said constitutes a “consciousness of guilt.”

When interviewed, Carr claimed that he had nothing to do with the boy’s injury. He said he was going to a friend’s home when the seven-year-old said his brother had fallen on a knife.

Carr’s counsel, Matt Loundry, said this version of the events was one of two presented in the immediate aftermath of the incident by not just Carr, but the victim’s brother and mother. He said officers noted inconsistencies in the story and that one “independent witness” was said to have been told both versions.

One is that the 7-year-old came up to them and said his mother had been running around with a knife and stabbed her son by accident. The mother supposedly told the same witness that her son had fallen on a knife.

Loundry also added that the mother and her sons’ accounts of Carr punching her could not be corroborated and that there is no evidence, like blood on Carr or fingerprints on the knife or wooden slat found inside the family’s apartment. In addition, Loundry claimed that the boys had a reason to lie to investigators — to protect their mother. The independent witness had no such reason to lie.

Fletcher countered that the injuries the victim suffered were consistent with a slash and not a fall, and that when the boys were interviewed, both started to cry as they described Carr slashing the eight-year-old. This was not emotional trauma caused by a lie, Fletcher stressed.

Fletcher added that the victim couldn’t be coached on what story to tell as he lay on the ground, severely wounded, even if their mother tried to cast the incident as an accident.

Fletcher’s argument in favor of detention also relied on both Carr’s past and the mother’s past hesitancy to hold him accountable. Carr was accused in 2022 of strangling his then-girlfriend, and there was an instance of domestic violence involving Carr and the mother two weeks prior, one where she did not press charges.

Officers responding to a 911 call found Carr and the mother fighting outside the complex, “literally rolling on the ground” as Judge Olmstead interpreted. Fletcher described Carr as getting up off the ground and trying to walk away; when he was later placed in handcuffs, the mother got upset over this, refused to cooperate with officers and denied they had been fighting.

The person who called 911 didn’t want to get involved, Fletcher said. With no cooperating witnesses, Carr was never charged with a crime in that case.

Another piece of Carr’s past that Fletcher used in his argument was his “immunity to supervision.” In his prior domestic battery case, Carr was released with GPS monitoring as a condition of release; he later missed a court hearing, and when officers found Carr, his GPS monitor was missing. He had cut it off and discarded it in a woman’s garden.

After hearing the arguments, Judge Olmstead made several observations and notes. Regardless of the various versions of the story, it was obvious that something had happened to the victim, leaving him with severe injuries. There is no physical evidence putting Carr inside the apartment where the stabbing happened, and there are only the statements of the mother and her sons that place him there.

Olmstead noted that she has credibility issues and there was no sign of injury on her, which casts doubt on the two misdemeanor counts he is charged with. But Olmstead found that while Carr did not admit he was inside the apartment, he was nonetheless in the courtyard.

Having read reports on the incident beforehand, Olmstead described the version of the boy falling on a knife as “hogwash” and said that in domestic violence cases such as this, it is common for victims to cast injuries as an accident. But when the mother finally recognized that her son had been hurt, she began cooperating and described events consistent with her son’s injuries.

For the purposes of the detention hearing, Olmstead found that the interviews provided “clear and convincing evidence” needed to detain Carr. In addition, Olmstead found that his repeated instances of domestic violence, including with the victim’s mother, means that he poses a threat to her. And because of his past crime of cutting off his GPS monitoring device, Carr had demonstrated that he cannot be effectively monitored and that there is no condition of release that can prevent him from threatening the victim’s mother.

For those reasons, Olmstead granted the state’s petition to deny Carr pretrial release and ordered him detained in the Champaign County Jail.

Carr is due back in court on July 2 for a preliminary hearing.