By Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 11, 2005; Page A01

John Springer had just settled down for a cozy Sunday visit with his 95-year-old mother when the hushed halls of the Goodwin House retirement community in Alexandria were pierced by a woman's scream.

Springer leapt up and ran down the hall to a small office, where he saw a large man in a gray housekeeping uniform bent over an employee, slashing her in the face repeatedly with a steak knife. Blood reddened the walls and the carpet.

"I knew what I had to do," Springer said yesterday. He lunged toward the man, who remained absorbed in his silent, methodical work, and pulled him off the woman.

Then the man turned his flashing blade in Springer's direction, throwing him down on the ground and repeatedly slashing his face.

"I knew he was cutting me. I could feel it," Springer, 62, a legal administrator, recalled yesterday. Blood began gushing down his left cheek. Then he couldn't see.

By the time the assailant was subdued by two other visitors and an Alexandria police officer, four elderly residents also were seriously injured, including two who were stabbed or slashed as they lay helpless in their beds in the facility's health care center. In all, six people, not seven as originally believed, were injured in the attack, including one who suffered a broken neck and another who needed 200 stitches, police said. Two victims remained hospitalized last night.

Alexandria General District Court Judge E. Robert Giammittorio yesterday ordered a member of the housekeeping staff, Mustafa Mohamed, 30, of Alexandria, held without bond on two counts of malicious wounding.

Mohamed requested that a public defender represent him. Public defender Melinda Douglas declined to comment last night.

Commonwealth's Attorney S. Randolph Sengel said the attack might have stemmed from a disagreement between the suspect and another staff member at the facility, where Mohamed had worked since 2003.

Although there have been a number of high-profile incidents of workplace violence in recent years, the number of homicides and assaults has declined about 20 percent since the mid-1990s, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Health care and social services workers faced the highest risk of non-fatal assault.

During 2002, the latest year for which statistics were available, 18,104 non-fatal assaults, including shootings, stabbings and beatings, were reported at private-sector workplaces.

According to court documents, Mohamed also was accused of pummeling a co-worker in another dispute at a workplace, a CVS drugstore, in 2003. The case was dropped after the victim declined to testify.

Yesterday, several of the retirement community's 400 residents spoke with counselors and a chaplain brought in by the staff of Goodwin House, who sought to quell residents' fears.

"We need to make sure we provide support and . . . make sure they're well," said Colleen Ryan Mallon, corporate director for marketing at Goodwin House. "It's very scary."

The facility has filed the required incident report on the matter with the state Health Department, which regulates the health care center within Goodwin House, according to Connie Kane, the long-term care director for the state's Center for Quality Health Care Services and Consumer Protection. The state will probably do a follow-up investigation based on the report.

Mallon said the facility routinely does criminal background checks, drug tests and reference checks on prospective employees. Two former employers gave positive references for Mohamed, Mallon said, and the criminal background check found no prior criminal convictions locally.

Betty Lantz, 89, said she and other residents were concerned for the victims but not worried about their continued safety, believing that the attack was a random "one in a million thing."

"Everybody said he was a nice fellow, very pleasant. . . . He just snapped."

A former co-worker said yesterday that he had been involved in a different violent altercation with Mohamed in October 2003, while both were working at a CVS in Alexandria.

Omar Abikar, 22, who was then a shift manager, said he tried to befriend Mohamed when he came to work as a stock boy that year, because both were Somali immigrants and new to the United States. Mohamed professed a desire to work up to manager, Abikar said.

"I was trying to do him a favor and help him," Abikar said. "When I first came to this country I had a mentor. I wanted to be his mentor."

One evening while a group of CVS employees were eating some cheese pizza in the break room, Mohamed came through the door and tripped on a stack of boxes. His co-workers laughed at him, Abikar said, and he became enraged.

"He looked at me and said in our language, 'Why are you laughing?' I said, 'I'm laughing like everybody else,' " Abikar recalled. Mohamed then began pummeling Abikar on the back and punched him twice in the face, Abikar told police. Abikar fled, and two other co-workers had to restrain Mohamed until police arrived.

But after Mohamed was charged with assault, Abikar told prosecutors he did not want to testify against him at a trial because other members of the Somali community begged him not to go forward, Abikar said. The case was dropped.

John Springer said yesterday that he felt lucky to be alive, after doctors at Inova Alexandria Hospital sewed up the four deep gashes in his face with 48 stitches.

The woman Springer tried to help, Jeanne Hobbs, 37, head of food services at Goodwin House, was resting at home in Arlington last night, with about 60 stitches on her face. Her husband, Geoffrey, said that she was interested in meeting Springer.

"He may have saved her life," Geoffrey Hobbs said.

Staff writer Stephanie McCrummen contributed to this report.