Prosecutors alleged Tuesday that after a Kansas man slashed a teenage clerk’s throat in a back room beer cooler last week, he returned to the store to try to eliminate the witness.

Buchanan County Assistant Prosecutor Ron Holliday said Sean E. Cave, 38, slit the 18-year-old clerk’s throat again in an attempt to kill her in the Thursday robbery in Winthrop, Mo.

Calling Mr. Cave a “prior and persistent offender” with an extreme flight risk, Mr. Holliday was granted a request and Buchanan County Associate Circuit Judge Ron Taylor denied bond in the Tuesday morning hearing. Mr. Cave was arraigned while he was in the Law Enforcement Center. He appeared at his hearing through a video conference.

Mr. Cave faces the possibility of three life sentences in prison. He is charged with first-degree assault, first-degree robbery and armed criminal action — all felony charges. He is being held at the Buchanan County Jail and will appear in court again at 10 a.m. July 15.

In Winthrop, a farming community just a short bridge walk from Kansas, many thoughts in the town of fewer than 100 residents are on Kimberly Dejonge, who celebrated her 19th birthday on Tuesday.

At her hospital bed, Ms. Dejonge uses a whiteboard to write messages, and remains resolute on recovery, her coworkers said. Her vocal cords were severed in the robbery.

One clerk, Doloras Reedy, said when she visited, Ms. Dejonge wrote, “I survived my attack, and I will get my voice back.”

When another clerk, Penny Smith, visited, she wrote, “He couldn’t even kill me,” following the sentence with “lol,” shorthand for “laughing out loud.”

Ms. Smith and her boyfriend were among the first people on scene at Stop N Go shortly after the evening robbery.

She found Ms. Dejonge, face-down, applying pressure to her throat. She had dragged herself out of the beer cooler after the initial attack. Ms. Dejonge’s throat was slashed again, and she was stabbed multiple times when Mr. Cave returned, Ms. Smith said.

She also said a store customer had seen Mr. Cave’s vehicle and reported that information to the authorities, which helped police locate the suspect.

Mr. Cave took a computer tower containing video surveillance of the robbery. Police later recovered the equipment from his home in nearby Atchison, Kan., according to court documents.

“My first thought was, she was shot. And I asked ‘Are you shot?’ and she shook her head,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s been hard for me to come back to work. I still see her laying there.”

Clerks in Winthrop said the majority of their customers cross the border from Kansas to benefit from lower gasoline, tobacco and liquor prices in Missouri. “You know what they smoke, what they drink and what their spouses argue about,” said Shelley Dressler, a clerk at Stop N Go.

“But it (the robbery) has made us realize that we don’t really know the people that we thought we did,” Ms. Dressler said, adding her shock to realize Mr. Cave is a registered sex offender in Kansas.

Ahmad Safi can be reached

at ahmadsafi@npgco.com.