A simple walk to her car turned into a harrowing experience for Bernice Rasely of Butler.

“I turned my back and the next thing I knew his arms were around my neck and he took my purse,” the 48-year-old woman testified at a preliminary hearing Monday in Butler.

Only moments earlier, she had given her attacker a light he requested for his cigarette.

The purse-snatching Dec. 13 outside the Monroe Hotel in Butler, which was playing host to an employee Christmas party, would not end well for the suspect.

After allegedly brandishing a large knife and waving it at several Good Samaritans, cutting one man, Zachariah A. Swann was eventually tackled and held down until Butler police arrived, according to testimony.

When it was over, Swann, 25, of Butler was behind bars, but not before a trip to the hospital for treatment of injuries sustained during his thwarted getaway.

District Judge William Fullerton at the morning hearing ordered the defendant held for trial on charges of robbery, aggravated assault, attempted aggravated assault and two weapons charges for wielding the 7½-inch fixed-blade knife.

Later in the afternoon, Swann waived his preliminary hearing in another case — this one for sucker-punching and beating a fellow inmate at Butler County Prison.

Rasely, who works at the Monroe Hotel, said she began screaming after the suspect accosted her shortly before 9 p.m. and took the purse that she had on her arm.

But she told prosecutor Terri Schultz, a county assistant district attorney, that she wasn’t hurt.

“Just shocked,” Rasely testified.

Her screams caught the attention of others nearby, including Curt Reese, one of the co-owners of the hotel who was outside when he saw the suspect running.

Like the other witnesses who testified, Reese, 46, of Butler had little trouble identifying Swann as the alleged robber.

“You can’t miss his dreadlocks,” Reese said. Swann’s tattoo-plastered face was another giveaway.

Reese briefly gave chase but he was unable to find the defendant. He saw two others, Torre Moore and Zachary Angert, who had joined in the chase.

The 29-year-old Angert of Summit Township told Schultz that he and Moore were closing in on Swann when Reese drove up in his car and maneuvered it to “corner” the suspect.

That’s when the suspect allegedly pulled out a knife from his sweat pants.

“He was waving it around and (cursing),” Angert said. “We told him to give up, the cops were on the way.”

But Swann continued to swing and flail the knife until it cut the palm of Angert’s right hand.

Angert downed played the injury.

“It was bleeding but it was not some big gouge,” he said. He acknowledged that he did not receive medical care for the wound.

Moore and Angert with the help of Reese’s brother, Tom Reese, who also co-owns the hotel, eventually took Swann to the ground on North Elm Street, just a block away from the hotel.

By then, Angert told Swann’s attorney, public defender Maura Palumbi, a crowd of 10 bystanders and onlookers had gathered.

Still, Swann kept hold of the knife. Kurt Reese moved in and ended that.

“I stomped it out of his hand,” Reese testified.

Butler police Sgt. William Mayhugh said that when he got there, he saw “a large group of people holding down the suspect.”

A search of the defendant turned up $15 — one 10-dollar bill and a 5-dollar bill, Mayhugh said.

That’s the same amount of money — in the same denominations — that Rasely told police was in her purse.

“That’s what everything was over,” she testified. “Fifteen dollars.”

Following the hearing, Mayhugh said Swann needed six surgical staples to close a cut to the head that he suffered during the tussle with the others.

The defendant was later placed in Butler County Prison on $50,000 bail.

Five days later, authorities said, Swann allegedly attacked another inmate, Jason R. Stine, 36, of Pittsburgh.

The Dec. 18 jailhouse beat-down, captured on surveillance video, was apparently in retaliation for Stine testifying against a friend of Swann’s during a murder trial in Allegheny County last fall.

Stine, who was jailed on charges in two separate burglaries in Butler, suffered a bloody nose that required treatment by the prison medical staff.

Detectives last month charged Swann with retaliation against a witness or victim, and simple assault in the prison attack.

He waived those charges to court Monday.