An Ocala man with a long history of arrests is behind bars after a child claimed he spanked her with a wire.
Dalton Lee Abney, 27, was taken into custody late Wednesday afternoon and transported to the Marion County Jail. He was charged with cruelty toward a child/child abuse without great bodily harm and is being held on $10,000 bond. He is due in court Dec. 3 at 9 a.m. to answer to the charge.
Last Tuesday, Marion County sheriff’s deputies spoke with a juvenile who said she discovered injuries on the child while giving her a bath. The Department of Children and Families was alerted and the following day, the child was taken to Kimberly’s Center for Child Protection, where she was seen by a nurse with the Child Protection Team, a sheriff’s office report states.
The child was found to have dark purple bruising across her buttocks and right leg/thigh. She was heard stating that she had been punished and spanked with a wire by a man identified as “Dalton,” the report says.
A detective with the sheriff’s office’s Major Crimes Division reviewed digital images of the child’s injuries and determined them to be “significant and not consistent with corporal punishment.” He also noted “loop markings/sparring patterns with the bruised areas, which could be consistent with a thin cord,” the report says.
The detective spoke with the child’s mother, who said that she had gone to pick up a child she babysits and when she returned, she discovered that her daughter had purposely urinated on herself because she was mad that she hadn’t gotten a goodbye kiss. The mother said Abney also questioned her daughter about the incident and punished her with a black cord, the report says.
After being read his rights, Abney admitted “that he had spanked the child in the past with his hand and it apparently had not stopped her from intentionally peeing on herself.” He confirmed that in the most recent spanking he had used speaker wire and struck the child five times. He was then shown images of the child’s injuries and “admitted that the punishment had gone too far and he had not mean to abuse the child,” the report says.
Abney is no stranger to the Marion County legal system. In fact, jail records show that he has been held in the facility 10 times since November 2011 on a litany of charges.