BUTLER TWP — A township man is headed for court on charges he bound his girlfriend with duct tape during an assault last week at their apartment.

“He taped it around my body like a mummy,” Julie Kettner testified at Thursday’s preliminary hearing for 29-year-old Gary J. Tichansky.

District Judge Kevin O’Donnell following testimony ordered Tichansky held for court on aggravated assault, unlawful restraint, terroristic threats, false imprisonment and simple assault.

He remains in the Butler County Prison on $50,000 bail.

Butler Township Patrolman Alan Mores about 7:30 p.m. Aug. 4 was sent to the couple’s then-apartment in the 900 block of East Jefferson Street after an upstairs neighbor reported hearing Kettner screaming.

The couple no longer lives at that apartment.

Tichansky answered the door and police found the 37-year-old woman in a back bedroom. She was bruised and bloody and “crying hysterically,” Mores said.

He described seeing a “goose egg” on her forehead and her lip was bleeding. She complained of pain to her hand.

“Gary lost it and he threw me against the wall a few times and punched me a few times,” Kettner testified.

She recounted that Tichansky used duct tape to bind her hands and arms down so she would not leave. He wrapped the tape around her body and face.

The defendant, Kettner said, also choked her around the neck. She said she feared for her life and at one point possibly passed out.

She was taken that night to Butler Memorial Hospital for medical treatment. Her injuries, she said, included a broken finger, fractured cheek bone and a concussion.

On cross-examination, Tichansky’s attorney, Butler County Chief Public Defender Kevin Flaherty, immediately questioned Kettner about her claim that his client had used duct tape during the alleged assault.

Mores earlier acknowledged that he did not see any evidence of duct tape in the apartment that night.

Kettner told Flaherty that before police got there, the defendant had taken the tape off her and put it in the bathroom trash can.

He then threw the contents of the trash can into a garbage container outside.

“Didn’t you think to tell police where the tape was?” Flaherty asked.

She admitted that due to the ordeal that night, she forgot to tell police.

“I went outside the next day and found (the tape) and took it to the police station,” Kettner testified.

Flaherty, meanwhile, also got Kettner to acknowledge that she may have caused some of her injuries to herself, while tussling with Tichansky.