A 41-year-old Bainbridge Island man was charged with second-degree assault in Kitsap County District Court after he allegedly assaulted his wife, a 36-year-old Bainbridge woman.

Police were contacted just before 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 13 about an assault that she said happened that morning at the family’s home.

An officer met the woman in the parking lot of the police station and, according to his investigation report, “I immediately noticed she had been battered. I observed two large, swollen contusions on the right side of her head above her eye. She also had a very swollen, red and bruising right eye.”

The woman told police she had been working in her garden but got into an argument with her husband when she went inside the house and he wanted to know where she had been earlier in the day.

She told police the argument escalated quickly and she could tell “something bad was going to happen.”

The husband had been holding a bucket containing Legos, but allegedly emptied the bucket and swung it hard at her face. She said he did it a few times and then hit her so hard she lost consciousness. The woman also said he had hit and choked her many times during the 12 years they have been together.

The woman also said the abuse started about 10 years earlier and was becoming more frequent and she couldn’t take it any longer.

When told that her husband would need to be interviewed by police, she said she was in fear for her life and her husband “would probably kill her now,” according to the investigation report.

Worried that her husband would seek revenge, she asked if she could just go home and that she had learned to live with the abuse and could take it.

Police contacted the suspect at the family’s home, who said the argument had begun the previous night but started back up the following morning.

He said he was upstairs playing with Legos with his son when she started yelling at him from downstairs, and that he dropped the one-gallon bucket from the loft in the home and it hit her on the head. He also said it didn’t seem to hurt her and that they had talked for three to four hours to try to work things out.

The man was arrested and booked into Kitsap County Jail for second-degree domestic violence assault.

He was charged with second-degree assault, a felony, on April 14 in Kitsap County District Court.

Conviction of second-degree assault can result in a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine.