AUGUSTA, Ga.– A Richmond County Deputy is out of a job and behind bars, accused of physically abusing a 12-year-old. The Richmond County Sheriff’s Office says Deputy Alton Walker hit a 12-year old boy with a collapsible metal baton. They also say he hit the boy with his hand in the face and chest, all as the child was handcuffed to a basketball goal.
The boy’s mom tells News 12’s Laura Warren she hoped Walker would talk to her son, Brandon, and help get him back on the right track, but instead, he sent him to the hospital.
A hospital bracelet now marks the place where handcuffs squeezed 12 year old Brandon’s wrists. His mom says, “I am in shock. I’m mad, I’m upset, I’m just stunned.”
She says she’s a single mom who was just trying to keep her 12 year old from choosing the wrong path.
“He’s a wonderful kid. He’s very smart in school. Good academics, all around good kid, it’s just that Brandon started hanging out with the wrong crowd so to speak,” she explained.
He has honor roll awards, football trophies, and enough medals to outfit a small army lining shelves in the family’s living room, but despite his success, his mom worried her son was starting down a different path, leading him away from scholar athlete and towards a life of bad choices.
” He had got with the wrong crowd and he started hanging out a little later. I knew the friends he was bringing around weren’t appropriate friends,” she said, so she stepped in.
“As a concerned mom, I refused to let the streets have my baby,” she said.
A friend suggested letting a deputy she knew come over to talk to Brandon, to keep him on the right path.
“That’s all the situation was supposed to have been. The officer comes over, speaks to my son, talk to him… No physical contact, no nothing,” she said.
She was at work Tuesday night when she told Deputy Alton Walker it was okay to drop by, but her son says the deputy did a lot more than talk, and he has a hospital bracelet to show for it.
Neighbors say they heard the boy crying out. They looked over the fence to see him being pushed up against a shed. Then, they say they saw the off duty deputy handcuff the boy to a basketball goal.
A neighbor who called 911 said, “He hollered, ‘Quit tasing me!’ He wasn’t smacking him, he was punching him. I’m talking about like he was a boxer. Slamming him up beside the building, throwing him on the ground. I seen him pull his baton out a couple of times and hit him.”
“The thing this officer did to my child in his own yard is what I was trying to prevent from happening to my child period,” said his mom.
A lesson a mother hoped would open her sons eyes, she now fears has scarred him for life.
Deputy Alton walker is being charged with two felonies. He’s charged with False Imprisonment and Cruelty to Children in the first degree.
Investigators say the deputy never tased the boy, just arced it a few times to scare him, but the neighbor says he saw the boy tased. Brandon says he got ‘electrocuted’ several times. He says his thigh still feels strange from the sensation.
Source: http://www.wrdw.com/home/headlines/ONLY-ON-12-291585081.html