FLOYD -- When asked why he struck a woman with a vehicle and beat her with a log and a club in the parking lot of Slaughters' Supermarket, Jeffery Young told a forensic psychologist that there was something about the store's name.

"He thought somebody was to be slaughtered there," Dr. Doris Nevin told jurors in Floyd County Circuit Court on Tuesday, the first day of testimony in Young's trial.

Young is charged with malicious wounding in connection with the Jan. 30, 2008, attack on Ciera Sowers Boyd, who was then 20. He also is being tried on two counts of obstructing justice and one of assaulting a law enforcement officer stemming from a confrontation with officers who were called to Slaughters'. His trial is expected to wrap up today.

His defense attorneys, Neil Horn and Fred Kellerman, aren't denying that Young attacked Boyd. Instead, they are trying to show jurors that he has paranoid schizophrenia and was unable to form criminal intent, making him not guilty.

Young, 32, had been charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with the death of lawyer Thomas Farrell. Farrell was struck by a vehicle and killed while on an early morning jog near his Roanoke County home just two days before the incident at Slaughters'.

Young was acquitted of the involuntary manslaughter charge at a June trial in Roanoke County. Prosecutors had no eyewitnesses and lacked physical evidence tying him to the case.

Jurors heard from several eyewitnesses in the Floyd County case Tuesday who described seeing Young ram his mother's four-door Nissan into Boyd, then strike her over the head with a log as many as eight times. When the log broke, he got a butcher knife and a small wooden bat out of the car, they said, and used the bat to strike her about three more times.

Boyd testified that she was walking into the store for her shift as a produce clerk that afternoon when she thought she heard a vehicle start.

"Next thing I know, I'm laying on the ground in front of the door," she said. A man she didn't know was circling her, she said.

Boyd took a clip out of her shoulder-length brown hair to show jurors a long scar that snakes around the back of her head. Her injuries required stitches and staples, she said, and she still takes medication for vertigo she has experienced since the incident.

Deputy Tim Dulaney with the Floyd County Sheriff's Office testified that he was the first officer to arrive at Slaughters'. He got out of his car, pointed his pistol at Young and yelled for him to drop the weapons, he said, but Young continued toward him with the knife in one hand and the bat in the other.

Only when Deputy Chad Harris shot pepper spray into the air, missing Young, did Young drop the weapons, the deputies testified.

A psychiatrist, two psychologists and Young's mother, Roberta Young, all testified about incidents involving Young that date back several years. He was hospitalized at mental facilities in 2003, 2004 and 2007, they said.

In 2006, he cut his hand off with a chain saw, claiming it was an accident that happened as he cut firewood. The hand was reattached.

One time, Roberta Young testified, her son told her he needed to cleanse her by fire and poured gasoline on her mattress. She got into her car and slowly drove down Bent Mountain from her home in Copper Hill, her son clinging to the car's hood.

Another time, she said, he tried to strangle her because she didn't agree with him that he was Jesus incarnate.

She said she began seeing dramatic changes in her son -- once a good student at Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke who was a chess champion and earned the title of Eagle Scout -- after he nearly died in a car crash in 1998.

Dr. Joy O'Grady, a psychologist, testified that when she evaluated Young in April of 2008, she concluded that he was insane at the time of the offense at Slaughters' and wasn't aware of the consequences of his actions.

Nevin, however, later disagreed, saying she believed Young may suffer from serious mental illness but that he was able to control his own behavior.