A 33-year-old Port Orchard man was jailed on assault charges after he allegedly bit his girlfriend’s hand when they were fighting early Sunday and then resisted arrest.

Kitsap County sheriff’s deputies responded shortly before 4 a.m. to an apartment on Cedar Crescent Drive SE and talked with the 36-year-old victim and her mother in the living room. The woman and her boyfriend had been arguing earlier, prompting a law enforcement response to the verbal dispute around 2 a.m.

During the second visit by deputies, both women said the male suspect had continued yelling at them after the first officers left, and that things eventually escalated into a physical fight between the boyfriend and girlfriend that included him biting her hand, according to charging documents filed in Kitsap County District Court.

The deputies reported seeing “several small puncture type marks” on the woman’s hand, and a long scratch on her arm.When they went out on the back porch to talk with the male suspect, they noticed an odor of intoxicants when they approached him.

He denied that there had been any physical altercation, but when asked about the bite marks on his girlfriend’s hand, he replied “that her hand was in his mouth,” according to the deputies’ report. When pressed to explain, the man said his girlfriend’s hand went in his mouth when she tried to choke him.

When a deputy tried to arrest and handcuff the suspect, who is described as 6-foot-2 and weighing over 200 pounds, the man pulled away and tried to walk back in the house, then spread his feet apart and bent over at the waist, bracing himself to prevent the officers from taking him to the ground. One deputy reported that they struggled with the susped and it took multiple “knee strikes to his stomach area” to get the man down, then more knee strikes to his ribs and back before the officers could pull his arms behind his back and handcuff him.

He did not offer further resistance, and was taken to the Kitsap County Jail.

He was booked for fourth-degree assault domestic violence and resisting arrest, with bail set at $20,000.