ALPENA — An Ossineke man accused of physically assaulting his wife and causing an hours-long police standoff last fall will head toward trial, Judge Ed Black decided on Tuesday in Alpena’s 88th District Court.

According to witnesses, Mark Deckard, 53, called 911 on Oct. 21, claiming that his wife was intoxicated and endangering him.

When police officers arrived at the Ossineke home, Deckard shouted at them to go away, a Michigan State Police officer testified.

The officers drove away, only to be notified by a 911 dispatcher of an in-progress altercation involving a gun at the house they had just left, the officer said.

In an upstairs bedroom of the house, Deckard’s wife had tried to call 911 to report her husband was attacking her but thought she didn’t complete the call, Janice Deckard said in court on Tuesday.

The call did go through, although her husband knocked the phone out of her hand, and a dispatcher listened as Mark Deckard grabbed her by her hair, knocked her off balance, and pinned her on the floor, Janice Deckard said.

She described screaming and struggling to breathe as her husband put her into a chokehold, telling her he had a gun.

“‘Nobody’s going to know what happened to me,'” Janice Deckard remembered thinking. “I was bracing for what it would feel like, for a split second, to be shot in the head.”

Eventually, she told her husband she thought she heard police outside, and he left the room to check, she testified.

Meanwhile, police officers had converged outside the house.

MSP Trooper Kayla Moore, then with the Alpena post, said she and several other officers took cover near the house, hearing yelling inside.

When Deckard would not follow their orders to come out, they called in a MSP Emergency Support Team, trained to handle negotiations and highly dangerous incidents.

The Emergency Support officers smashed open the gate of the home’s fence with an armored vehicle, then used the vehicle to provide cover for Moore and other officers, the officer testified.

Police again ordered Mark Deckard to come out.

“However, he then flipped us off through the window,” Moore said.

The defendant eventually emerged from the house, and police arrested him, nearly five hours after police were called to the house, Moore said.

After her husband left the bedroom, Janice Deckard reached for the phone to call 911, only to discover a dispatcher had been listening all along, she said.

Black, presiding over Deckard’s preliminary examination in place of District Court Judge Alan Curtis because of a conflict, bound Deckard over on charges of unlawful imprisonment, assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder, and three other charges.

A person convicted of those charges could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.

Mark Deckard will continue toward trial after arraignment in Alpena’s 26th Circuit Court in coming weeks.

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693 or jriddle@thealpenanews.com. Follow her on Twitter @jriddleX.