Law enforcement officers are trained to write those arrest reports clearly and neutrally. The documents are typically void of emotion or judgment, whether they describe heinous crimes or unremarkable wrongdoing. But from time to time, even the investigator’s outrage peeks through in the subtlest ways.
It does in the Flagler County Sheriff’s arrest report of Joshua Alberto Rodriguez, 33, the latest Palm Coast resident in a growing list this year to be charged with a felony count of child abuse after he confessed to taking a belt to his 7-year-old daughter, leaving her visibly bruised. After the beating, he told the girl to put on a long-sleeved shirt “so cover the markings on her arm, so she would not get in trouble,” the deputy wrote in her report, the she italicized with indignation at the suggestion that Rodriguez would send his child to school not only bruised from the beating he’d inflicted, but with the suggestion that she could get in trouble for it.
It is not uncommon for those who abuse children to turn the tables and somehow find a way to pin the blame on the child.
School employees are trained to detect signs of abuse. They are required by law immediately to report suspected cases. The child attends Wadsworth Elementary, where a school employee reported the abuse on the 7-year-old child to the Department of Children and Families, one of whose investigators in turn informed the school resource deputy at Wadsworth on March 9.
Interviews of the child and her 10-year-old brother by DCF and child-protection authorities revealed that Rodriguez, 33, a resident of Palm Coast’s P Section, has been raising the children since the girl was a toddler but isn’t their biological father. He was left to care for them and get them ready for school the morning of March 9 when their 26-year-old mother left for work. Rodriguez was waiting for his mother-in-law to arrive and watch over the children.
During that time span, before the mother-in-law’s arrival, the girl’s older brother misplaced something. The siblings argued. It upset the girl. She started screaming. Rodriguez took his Gucci belt, headed for the girl’s room, and whipped her. “I knew I was going to leave a mark when I hit her,” he told authorities. He described the whipping as discipline. He said things “got out of hand.” That’s also when he said that he suggested the girl put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover the marks so she wouldn’t get in trouble at school. He told her not to take off the shirt.
By then, authorities had discovered that the “long, rectangular red shaped mark” on the girl’s arm from the belt wasn’t the only one on her body. “Another red marking was discovered on [her] lower back as well,” the arrest report states. “It appeared that there was potential ‘scabbing’ on her back as well.” A medical examination showed she had marks on her left leg and side as well. The 10-year-old boy told authorities that “he often gets hit with a belt by” Rodriguez. He could not remember when it last happened, though his sister said it happened that day, too.
Rodriguez’s wife told authorities that, in the report’s words, “It is not a form of average punishment for their household to use a belt, or any other objects, to discipline the children.”
The next day, Circuit Judge Chris France signed an arrest warrant, charging Rodriguez with felony child abuse “without great bodily harm,” a third degree felony. Rodriguez turned himself in at the Flagler County jail on March 10. The court docket, however, and the notice to appear for arraignment on April 11, issued by the court on March 11, lists the charge as aggravated child abuse, a first-degree felony. The State Attorney’s Office has not yet filed a charging information, which ratifies the actual charge to be prosecuted–assuming the State Attorney decides to prosecute.
Rodriguez posted bail on $5,000 bond and was released soon after he was booked at the jail.
Last week, deputies arrested a Palm Coast mother, a teacher in St. Johns County schools, for allegedly whipping her child with a belt (while her husband held him down) for peeing himself, adding to three abuse cases in February, including the case of a father charged of abuse after questioning his son wearing makeup. That charge was dropped.
Corporal punishment is legal in Florida as it is in all states. It has been banned in about 50 countries. In Florida, it is not illegal for a parent to beat up a child to the point of leaving welts and bruises. Only “significant” welts and bruises are considered child abuse. The law makes no distinction in the age of a child. Recent legislation emphasizes parental rights, with no concurrent legislation emphasizing children’s rights.
