The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office received an anonymous phone call late at night Oct. 1. The caller said some kind of elderly abuse seemed to be going on, and gave the address in Deltona where said crime was supposedly occurring.
Deputies knocked when they arrived, and a 36-year-old man with “a bloody face” opened the door. When the fellow realized that these were officers of the law, he slammed the door and locked it.
Deputies knocked some more and talked with Bloody Face Guy through the door. He told them “he was not OK, he was scared, and that something was wrong with him and he needed to talk to somebody.”
Finally Bloody Face Guy let the lawmen in. He told them he’d been quarreling in the driveway with his father “about the theft of some money” and had started to walk away. When he did, Bloody Face Guy said, he “tripped over the grass, and fell to the ground,” and that’s how he broke his nose. (He should have been MOW-tivated to cut the grass.)
Deputies called the guy’s father, who had left the house, and got his account of the night’s events. Dad said he and his son had gotten into a dispute “over the theft of some money between the two of them,” and his son swung his fist at his father, trying to punch him.
Dad said he dodged the punch and “in self-defense” swung at his son, striking his offspring in the nose with his fist. Then he drove away so “as to not aggravate the situation further.”
When Dad returned, deputies noticed that he wasn’t injured but had “some blood smears on his shirt.” Dad said those were from his son.
Deputies concluded that Bloody Face Guy was the primary aggressor; he was arrested and taken to jail on a charge of battery on a person age 65 or older.
So the fight with his father got son’s nose out of joint (and it also got him sent to the joint). Talk about adding insult (and incarceration) to injury!
— By Keith Allen, based on local police-agency reports.
