A Newport man was sentenced Jan. 24 to 10 years in prison for stabbing and seriously wounding a crewmate on a boat they had been working on.

Dylan X. Campana, 29, entered an Alford plea in Clatsop County Circuit Court for charges of strangulation and assault in the first degree.

An Alford plea is a guilty plea where the defendant does not admit to the crimes but acknowledges prosecutors could produce sufficient evidence for conviction.

Campana had initially been charged with attempted murder due to the severity of the wounds his victim suffered.

According to prosecutor Dawn Buzzard, the defendant had threatened to kill the victim and throw him overboard while at sea, first attempting to smother him with a pillow. In that occasion, Campana was pulled away by another crewmate.

Once the boat docked in Astoria, prosecutors said, Campana ordered the victim to go down into the boat’s fish hole, a designated area on deck designed to hold caught fish, and clean it. Campana then jumped in after him and took a sharp blade to the victim’s neck, sawing from ear to ear.

Buzzard said the emergency room doctor told a detective that it almost looked as if the victim had been “decapitated.”

“The pictures were horrendous,” Buzzard said. Campana “continued to stab him and cut him, and then he got (the victim) on the ground and curb-stomped him twice.”

Campana then fled the scene as the victim fought for his life. The defendant was later captured at a home in Morro Bay, California by local police and the San Luis Obispo Regional SWAT Team.

“I looked up to you as a big brother,” the victim, who attended the sentencing by video, told Campana. “And you totally betrayed my trust in a way where I have a hard time going outside nowadays … I respected you a lot, and for the most part, you respected me until you almost took my life away, and almost took me away from my own children and my family.”

The victim’s mother, also present by video, added that her son will have lifelong scars, is missing part of his ear and has partial facial paralysis as a result of the attack.

Judge Kirk Wintermute then asked the defendant if he wanted to make a statement.

“This is what you get for self-defense in America these days,” Campana said before turning to address the victim. “You’re a good liar. … You know, you (expletive) with the bull, you get the horns.”

The judge said that the defendant’s behavior in court that morning was concerning, with Campana being “constantly on alert.”

“I don’t know what’s happened in your life to make you this wary and this defensive about everything, but I can tell you what came out of this is a terrifying situation, and I don’t know what brought it on,” he told the defendant. “No matter what it was, there’s nothing we’ve heard and nothing that has been alleged that would get anywhere close to a self- defense claim for what you did.

“Right now, you need to focus on where you want to be in the future. You’re still a young guy, you can get out of prison and you can still move on with your life and not be in this cycle the rest of your life. But the way you’re reacting right now, if this keeps up, you’re going to be back in front of a judge when you get out, one way or the other, before too long.”

After 90 months in prison, Campana will be eligible for early release on good behavior and faces three years of post-prison supervision. As part of the plea deal, the state also agreed not to file charges on incidents from within Clatsop County Jail, where the defendant had been involved in several fights.

“I do think he’s got some kind of anger that’s beyond what other people have, and has no ability to control it,” Buzzard said. “So I don’t even know if he’ll be able to even get good time. Hopefully he can work on that, because when he does get out, and he will, I’m sure, I think he’s going to be a huge danger to whatever community he ends up in.”