As soon as he saw Kaleena Searle swing up her right arm, the 16-year-old boy from Tisbury knew something bad was coming his way.

"I knew I was going to get stabbed," the teenager told police last year.

It happened on a late night in mid-June. The boy had just walked out of Cumberland Farms carrying a quart of milk, a chicken sandwich and a Kudos bar.

When he turned the corner around the backside of the building into the lot where postal trucks pull in and Cumberland Farms employees park, he saw Miss Searle, a 20-year-old also from Tisbury.

She hollered out to the boy. They knew each other, but it was no friendly connection. They called each other names, shouted expletives. Then came the swing of the arm.

Miss Searle pleaded guilty last week in Dukes County Superior Court in Edgartown to a charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, admitting that she stabbed the teenager in the left side of his chest under the arm.

The boy ended up in surgery and then spent two days in the intensive care unit at the Martha's Vineyard Hospital recovering from a wound that had cut through his diaphragm, punctured the lung and sliced into his spleen.

The assailant is now in prison - at MCI (Massachusetts Correctional Institution) in Framingham, a medium security prison for female offenders - serving the first few days of a minimum four-year stretch handed down last week in the Edgartown courtroom.

From a judicial and law enforcement point of view, the Searle case has come full circle, starting with a crime, then an arrest and finally a conviction.

But the details of the case tell a troubling story, not just of youths and violence on the Island but also of a Vineyard culture where knives are prevalent.

"Pretty much everyone we deal with has a knife," said Oak Bluffs police Sgt. Tim Williamson. "It really seems like it's mostly kids, but a lot of people carry a knife. We'll see a lot of these kids and ask them, what do you need that for? ‘Protection,' they say."

Police readily offer up both statistics and anecdotes to bolster the assessment.

Last year, Oak Bluffs police arrested four juveniles who had stolen a car and then searched the boys' backpacks. They confiscated a total of eight knives. "These weren't just pen knives," said the sergeant.

In Edgartown, there have been 11 stabbings in the last three years. There were also seven cases in which someone brandished a knife and was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon.

Tisbury police records show that since November of 2000, there have been 11 cases of either stabbings or people found with illegal knives. State law makes it illegal to carry a variety of blades, including double-edged knives and folding knives with locking blades that are longer than one and one-half inches.

More than once, Oak Bluffs police have found illegal knives in the display case at Army Barracks, a store on Circuit avenue that sells a wide selection of knives. "We check the Barracks annually in the springtime," said Sergeant Williamson. "We've pulled double-edged knives out of there, and we've had to educate the manager on what's acceptable."

West Tisbury police chief Beth Toomey said knife possession among Island youths is on the rise, matching the increase in violence in this age group.

"It's an accessible weapon as opposed to firearms," she said. "Kids are thinking that violence is acceptable . . . I don't know if they think they're going to use [the knife] but there's an unbelievable bullying factor. For a number of kids, it's their security."

Three years ago, it took Oak Bluffs police seven weeks to find the person who slashed two teenaged girls just past midnight on Kennebec avenue, steps away from the main drag of downtown. The assailant turned out to be a 14-year-old boy, a student at the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School who used a nautical knife with a six-inch folding blade.

The latest youth risk behavior surveys conducted in 2000 and 2002 showed that roughly 20 per cent of Vineyard teenagers said they had carried a weapon in the previous 30 days. Among high school students, the rate was 16 per cent. Of the middle schoolers, 23 per cent said they had carried a weapon in the preceding month.

On the survey, a weapon was defined as a gun, a club or a knife. Statewide, 13 per cent of high school students surveyed in 2001 reported carrying a weapon in the past month.

To be fair, some Island police and school officials point out that the Island traditions of hunting and fishing make knives much more commonplace. And knives are rarely showing up on school grounds. Regional high school assistant principal Doug Herr said that since 1993, he has confiscated only seven knives, most of them pen knives.

But the confluence of knives and violence is not limited to teenagers. Of the 11 stabbings in Edgartown since 2000, only two involved teenagers as the attackers. The rest ranged from men and women in their 20's to 50's.

The last two murders on the Island - both stabbings - were committed by men in their mid-twenties. One attack stemmed from a drug deal, the other from an argument over a girlfriend.

But as the Searle case proves, the lives of Island teenagers can easily intersect with a slightly older crowd. The night of the stabbing in Tisbury, Miss Searle was a front seat passenger in a Suzuki Esteem driven by 19-year-old Walker Souza of Edgartown. In the backseat were three teenagers: a 13-year-old boy from Oak Bluffs, a 15-year-old boy from Tisbury and his 18-year-old girlfriend, Amanda Sullivan, also from Tisbury.

According to the police report, they were cruising the Island and heading through Vineyard Haven when Miss Searle told the driver to turn around and go back to Cumberland Farms.

She had spotted the victim inside the convenience store and then waited for him by the split rail fence near the post office driveway. When the boy came out of the store, Miss Searle yelled at him. She later told police that the boy had harassed her when she was working at The Game Room in downtown Oak Bluffs.

The boy yelled back another insult, and Miss Searle came toward him, holding the black folding knife ready by her right leg.

After she stabbed him, she went back to Mr. Souza's car, telling her friends what she had done and asking the 15-year-old in the backseat to stash the knife in his blue and green knapsack. They drove to the high school and threw the bag into the woods near the bus parking area, the report stated.

When questioned by police, Miss Sullivan said that after the stabbing, they drove around the Island for about an hour. "Some of the people in the car were smoking and drinking marijuana," she told Tisbury police.

The victim, meanwhile, had thrown his food at Miss Searle and then stumbled to the fire station, believing he might find someone to help him. Instead, he saw a neighbor driving by and yelled out his name. The man, 18-year-old Michael Flynn, stopped his car and drove the boy to the hospital emergency room.

"He could feel his lungs fill with fluid," the police report stated. At the hospital, his blood pressure was dropping and he was having trouble breathing.

Police arrived at the hospital at 10:50 p.m. and asked for permission to speak to the victim. "Who stabbed you?" police asked.

""Kaleena, Kaleena Searle," the boy said.

Police wanted to know why. "Because I called her a narc," he said. Miss Searle told police that the victim had been harassing her for months.

After questioning Miss Searle and some of the teens in the car that night, police recovered the knife in the woods and photographed it. When they showed some of the teenagers a photo of the weapon, more than one of them "positively identified the knife as being the one Kaleena usually carries," according to the report.

When police showed the knife to Miss Searle, she readily admitted it was hers: "It's mine, see the blood on it," she said.

"I didn't want to kill him. I didn't want to stab him too deep," she added. "I just wanted to hurt him."