Los Angeles, CA– Several of you have written to me about the Associated Press story Dad chases nude boy from daughter’s room with pipe (9/12/08) and expressed confusion over why the father is being charged. It also seems rather baffling to me.
There may well be more to the incident than the AP explains, but from what’s there, the father’s reaction seems fair enough–he thought he was protecting his daughter from a sexual assault.
If anything, I fault the guy more for not knowing that his daughter had a boyfriend who was sneaking into her room to have sex with her…
According to the story:
An angry Deltona father whacked his teenage daughter’s boyfriend with a metal pipe after finding the boy naked in his daughter’s room. Authorities say the father, 45, didn’t even know his daughter had a boyfriend or that the youngster had been sneaking into the home for more than a year.
When he heard noises coming from his daughter’s bedroom Thursday morning and saw a stranger standing naked on the girl’s bed, he swung a metal pipe. He then chased the teen out the front door and called police.
The boy was taken to the hospital where doctors closed a head wound with staples.
The father was charged with aggravated battery on a child and bonded out on $10,000
In retrospect, I guess I was lucky I never had this boy’s problem–when I was a teenager I had a girlfriend who I would often sneak out of her window late at night because her father opposed her dating. We weren’t having sex, though…