Posted on 06/17/2007 7:28:37 AM PDT by TornadoAlley3
A Sellersburg man was arrested and charged with battery for allegedly spanking his son with a leather belt.
Sellersburg Police Department Deputy Chief Donnie Ross said the 7-year-old child’s mother called police Sunday night when he wouldn’t stop crying after suffering a spanking from his father, 46-year-old Ernest E. Haycraft of the 1900 block of Lincoln Drive. Haycraft told police the boy was being punished for purposely breaking one of his toys and that he only struck him “three or four times,” Ross said.
Officers, however, arrested Haycraft after seeing a raised, red welt on the boy’s buttocks.
“(The officers) saw that it was bad enough abuse, and that he needed to be arrested,” Ross said of the incident.
Haycraft has never before been arrested by the Sellersburg Police Department, and Ross thought it to be “a singular incident that hasn’t happened in the past.”
The investigation has been turned over to Child Protective Services of Clark County. A phone call placed to that office Tuesday afternoon was not returned, but a spokeswoman did confirm that a caseworker was investigating the incident. Ross said officers took pictures of the boy’s injuries and submitted them to CPS.
Clark County Deputy Prosecutor Shelley Marble — who specializes in crimes against children — said these types of cases do come across her desk from time to time.
“I probably get about one or two of these (types of cases) a month,” she said from her office Tuesday afternoon.
The problem, she said, is that what police officers find to be probable cause for an arrest often isn’t enough for
prosecutors to get a conviction.
“If a mom whips a kid with a belt, and the kid says it happened and the mom says it happened but there are no marks, then that’s enough for (police) to substantiate inappropriate discipline, but not enough for us to file charges,” she said.
“These types of cases depend on a lot of different variables,” she continued. “You do have parents that are disciplining their child and then you have beating — there is a difference. You have to look at each case individually.”
Marble said she had not yet been informed of the charges preliminary filed against Haycraft and that she likely wouldn’t be until CPS completed its investigation.
Ross said Sellersburg police have, in the past, made similar arrests “where parents have, in our opinion, overreacted to misbehavior and gone above and beyond what we would consider normal discipline.”
“They don’t happen often, but they do happen,” he said.
You are seriously creepy.
Closet Freeper: “You are seriously creepy.”
John Leland: Yes, we know. Those of us who hold on to biblicist Christianity and endeavor, by God’s Grace, to practice it in our homes, our businesses and in life’s affairs, will appear increasingly strange (creepier and creepier) to those who just flow with the tide of the world; it’s course (Ephesians 2:2) The world has a course. Christians are told not to take it; not to walk according to it. See also Romans 12:1-3. Governments will try harder and harder to force God’s children to follow the world’s course.
As Christians obey God with regard to their life patterns and course, and in the upbringing and educating of our children, we appear more and more as strangers and pilgrims (1 Peter 2:11). Creepier and creepier we will be in your eyes unless one day you discover your need of Jesus Christ and flee to Him. But that might sound creepy to you as well.
It has been happening in some states that people have said that the state has an interest in protecting the children from our creepiness, and they use child protective services to remove children from creepy Christian homes with false accusations of child abuse, not educating their children, etc.
When in the States, we even have to keep our creepy children in the house at 3:00 pm when the public school bus stops in front of our house. This is because the school bus driver, listening to the public school system about us creepy home schoolers, might say, “See, those kids are not in school!” and she will file reports, as she is told to do when she suspects kids not going to school. A bus driver actually did this to us once, and we had authorities at our door. They were very nice followers of the course of this world (Ephesians 2); WE were the creepy ones, of course.The kids getting off the bus bade throwing garbage on our front lawn, are, of course, the very sane, well-educated ones, with baggy britches that they have to hold up by keeping their hands on their crotch. These are the sane un-creepy kids with tatoos and lip rings and tongue rings. Some of those world-course gir;s look like sumu wrestlers in tank tops with oily ratty hair. So, us creepy people have to find each other like insects crawling around through the societal frame of modern society with its passing trends. Yep, CREEPY!
inappropriate discipline, the filing of charges - give me a break! my old man would be serving about a hundred back to back life sentences if charges were filed every time he took his strap to my backside. my dad was a good parent who taught me right from wrong - sometimes very painfully. but no matter how painful, i knew he did it because he cared about me and wanted me to grow up to be the responsible adult that i am. the law should stay out of it unless there is clearly abuse going on.
That black leather belt was awfully sincere, lol.
The only part that rang false every time was the old "this is going to hurt me worse than it is you!" lolol
I'd trust the education imparted by those ruler-straight Amishmen long before I trusted whatever passes for a school system in Des Moines.
My cousin and his wife are both very educated and, from your point of view, worldly, making their way as they do in the field of academics. But they were thinking of both his career and their boys' education when they pulled up stakes long sunk in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and betook themselves to a small town in the Great Plains, he to join the local college administration and she the library staff, but partly and importantly to move their boys out of the suburbicarian school system with its drugs and vices and into a cleaner, simpler, more backward social scene that more closely resembled the one we went to school in 40 years ago. No drugs, no guns, no gangs, no girls trying to learn to be skank hoes and party girls, or for that matter, LUGS, and no rainbow clubs with SIECUS/GLSEN sponsors, pederast facilitators and fashion-forward, amazingly witty and charming student advisors.
They found the "eject" lever and pulled it.
You don’t get it. The state wants your kid to screw up so they can assume control. Once your kid goes into the juvie system, the state is in your lives and POCKETBOOK.
Or to undermine the other parent with the child in some sick family dynamic that neither courts nor police are equipped to adjudicate. Or will you assert now that governmental units are omnicompetent, or merely omnipotent, over the life of the family?
That’s what we have trials for.
Have you ever been to trial and paid a lawyer up front because he demanded ten, twelve, fifteen K up front before you went to trial? A trial? For this?
But if a child’s mother is feeling the need to call police over a beating that the child’s father delivered in their home, then it’s right for the police and courts to get involved.
One welt. One single welt, and the cops are involved because Daddy took his belt off.
Seriously, the opinions you've expressed on this thread constitute about 25% of what is wrong with this country. You are seriously, seriously screwed-up on this issue.
The worst experience I ever remember was the one day when I was about 16 and called my mother a 'bitch' - my father didn't use a belt that time. I remember when he found out he called me out of my room and asked me "What did you call my wife?" - growing up my father whenever talking to me or any of the kids had always referred to my mother by saying "your mother". I got punched in the mouth and I will never forget it. More importantly, I learned my lesson the hard way.
yeah but have you ever had to take a bite out of a bar of Ivory soap?
My dad told me about a woman he had been married to before I was born. She had two children who were impossible to handle. After doing everything he could to deal with them, he raised a couple of whelts when they threw their brand new cowboy boots into the Colorado River. They suddenly behaved very well. Even their biological dad said he was impressed by the improvement in their behavior.
Go back to your closet.
LAVA.
I don’t think it’s me that’s screwed, but many of the courts that handle these cases certainly are. What was missing from this story was whether the mother approved of the removal. Since she initiated the law enforcement intervention, she probably did, since there is no allegation that she did anything wrong and thus she would have been allowed to keep the children as long as the father left the house (which presumably the court could have required).
The legal system can’t just ignore parents who contact it and allege that a crime has been committed against their child. That would only lead to more domestic violence and more parental abductions of children. What it CAN do — and should do, but often doesn’t — is require much higher standards of proof for taking action against a parent on anything longer than a short term, emergency basis. And they should get hired, adversarial lawyers out of the picture, partly due to the appalling expense which the innocent party can’t always afford, and also because it tends to further polarize an already adversarial situation, and that clearly doesn’t benefit anyone (except the lawyers who are collecting their fees).
How come all those years of discipline with a belt resulted in a 16 year old who was calling his mother a “bitch”? Sounds like the belt approach didn’t work too well.
All I remember is being upset with my mother about something and then trying to act tough.
never got the “this is going to hurt me more....” routine. good thing because i probably would have mouthed off with a “yeah, right” reply and then would have gotten double. a price was paid for all bad deeds.
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