UPDATE 9:30 p.m.:

The suspect in an apparently random hammer attack was arrested Friday evening, police say.

Gresham Police officer Ben Costigan said Jonathan Jones was arrested around 7:35 p.m., after Portland police spotted him outside his Jeep and he ran from them.

Jones, 39, allegedly walked into a Gresham 7-Eleven on Friday morning, swung a hammer and hit Paul Dovgan, who was reported to be getting coffee at the time.

Dovgan is in the hospital and suffered several head injuries, according to his wife, Natalie Dovgan.

“He’s doing OK," said Dovgan. “It could have been a lot worse — we could have lost him today.”

Dovgan was at the 7-Eleven at 1430 NE 181st Ave., Gresham, around 5 a.m. Natalie Dovgan said her husband and his carpool sometimes stop at the 7-Eleven before heading to work. On Friday, she said, he was getting his coffee while a friend waited for him.

Dovgan said the friend told her that he saw a man in the store, later determined to be Jones, briefly glance at her husband, and then walk out to his car, before coming back in with a hammer.

“He came up to him, and my husband turned around, and the guy swung at him,” Dovgan said.

Dovgan said the hammer hit her husband just above his right eye, and he fell down, hitting the back of his head on a table. She said he was knocked unconscious, but regained consciousness in the store. She said he will have to get screws in his forehead, as well as staples in the back of his head. She said he also has some bleeding in his brain, which doctors will monitor.

Jones has a previous assault conviction for a similar attack in 2011, according to court records. An Oregonian article from 2011 states that Jones, then 31, was 13 days into a meth binge when he attacked a man in a Walmart parking long in Southeast Portland.

At that time, Jones claimed diminished capacity — saying that he was delusional and didn’t know what he was doing.

“I was on drugs,” he apologized to the victim at the sentencing in 2011. “It’s something I won’t do again.”

—Jayati Ramakrishnan; 503-221-4320; jramakrishnan@oregonian.com; @JRamakrishnan

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.