A LaGrange man accused in the near-fatal beating of a Kia Motors construction worker expressed contempt for his court-appointed lawyer Tuesday during opening testimony in his trial for armed robbery, aggravated assault and two counts of burglary.

Stacy Raymond Potts, 28, allegedly used the base of a car jack to strike Paul Wheatley, 53, of Newell, W. Va., about the face and head and steal $280 from him in a room at West Point Motel on Sept. 13.

Wheatley was staying in Room 19 of the motel on U.S. 29 while working at the 2,200-acre Kia site in West Point for Highland Excavating in Hillsboro, Ohio. Potts and his girlfriend, Alesha Michelle Dawson, 18, of West Point, were staying in Room 18.

Dawson said she was taking a shower when Potts came into the bathroom with a towel wrapped around the base of a car jack.

“He said he had to go do something, but he didn’t say what,” she said.

A cleaning person found the semiconscious victim lying in his blood-soaked bed about 8 the next morning and called 911.

During testimony by state’s witnesses Monday morning, public defender Jeff Shattuck informed Judge Quillian Baldwin that his client wanted to address the court. The 12-member jury was ordered back to the jury room and Potts told the judge, “I don’t think I’m being represented to the best of his ability.”

He said witnesses were telling lies that went unchallenged by his lawyer.

“You’re getting good representation,” Baldwin said, noting that questions a defendant wants to be asked might be irrelevant and hurt the case. “It’s up to your attorney to decide what questions are valid.”

“I just want you to know my objections while the trial is going on,” Potts said. “…. I’m not going to throw my life away because my attorney wants to help the district attorney win the case.”

Shattuck said his client “is telling me if I don’t ask the questions he wants asked, I’m not his attorney.”

Baldwin said he would let Potts represent himself, but that would be “a big, big, big mistake.”

“I almost guarantee you’d convict yourself because you can’t keep your mouth shut,” Baldwin said.

Potts said he’d “see how it goes.”

Wheatley suffered permanent injuries that will keep him in a nursing home for the rest of his life, said chief assistant district attorney Monique Kirby.

“Obviously it was a horrendous beating,” she told the jury in opening arguments.

Jeff Dorsey, the victim’s boss at Highland Excavating for about 11 years, visited Wheatley in the Colquitt nursing home and said Wheatley can’t remember anything after 1995.

“He can remember who I am,” Dorsey said. “He doesn’t remember what happened to him. He’s still in North Carolina working in his mind.”

Dawson pleaded guilty in April to a burglary on Mallory Drive and another at a residence across from the motel, and agreed to testify against Potts, who is her second cousin. She hasn’t been sentenced, but Kirby said she will recommend one year in prison and seven years’ probation because of her cooperation and lack of a felony record.

Dawson said Potts told her he had gone into Wheatley’s room, hit him once and got $280 from him.

“I told him I wanted to call the police because I was scared,” she said. “… I felt bad because he’s got a family just like we do. His family deserves to know what happened to him.”

Dawson said she and Potts went to LaGrange to get a prostitute for Wheatley and bring her back to the motel. Wheatley had just received a $1,400 paycheck.

Potts “told me that (Wheatley) had a lot of money because he worked at Kia,” the prostitute testified.

Dawson said she lied at Potts’ preliminary hearing when she testified that he had nothing to do with the beating and robbery.

“I was scared and he was in the courtroom,” she said.

Shattuck said Dawson agreed to testify against his client only after she was threatened with a possible 20-year prison term on the burglary charges, in addition to a possible charge of perjury.

The trial resumed today.

Joel Martin can be reached at jmartin@ lagrangenews.com or (706) 884-7311, Ext. 235.