By PHYLLIS ZORN

Staff writer

Hillsboro police still are trying to get to the bottom of a bizarre incident a week ago.

At 10:40 p.m. June 15, police and an ambulance were called to Casey’s General Store for a report of an uncooperative and intoxicated woman badly bleeding from her upper arm. She had left the store on foot.

Police followed a blood trail to find her. An ambulance took her to Hillsboro Community Hospital to be treated for her injuries.

Hillsboro and Marion police and sheriff’s deputies followed the trail from the store to a house in the 300 block of N. Ash St., where they found a man lying on the porch.

At first they thought the man was dead because he was face down and unmoving in a large pool of blood, Police Chief Jessey Hiebert said.

The blood was from a cut on his head. When officers stepped onto the porch, the man moved.

A glass panel in the house’s storm door was broken, leading police to believe the pair were injured by broken glass.

Hiebert said the woman was homeless and had been brought to Hillsboro from Wichita by a third man with a history of felony drug charges.

Neither injured person would talk about what had happened, officer Randy Brazil said.

The man told police he was too intoxicated to remember.

Brazil said the inside of the house was sparse. The man’s parents, with whom he had lived, moved out, leaving little at the residence.

A short .22 rifle was found near the door, and police are trying to find out why it was located where it was.

A white, powdery substance was found in the house, but police have not been able to determine what the substance was.

“We’re probably going to have to send it to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation,” Brazil said.

About an hour and a half after the woman was taken to HCH, she was transferred to Wesley Medical Center in Wichita.

Police say they contacted Wichita police to ask them to meet the woman at Wesley and talk to her. Wichita police immediately recognized her name, Hiebert said, but she was as uncooperative with them as she had been with Hillsboro police.

Police continue to investigate, but as of Tuesday, no evidence of any crime has come to light, Brazil said.

Brazil said police would seek a search warrant for the woman’s handbag, which was taken from her before the ambulance took her to the hospital. He expects contents of the bag to shed light on what took place that night.