A retired Orlando Police Department officer has been suspended from his duties as a school resource officer and is under investigation after handcuffing and arresting a 6-year-old girl when she threw a temper tantrum at her school.
Dennis Turner, a school resource officer at Lucious & Emma Nixon Academy, a charter school in the Orange County Public Schools district in Florida, is accused of not following the department's policy on juvenile arrests, reports The Washington Post. He also arrested an 8-year-old student at the same school in a separate event last Thursday.
The 6-year-old's grandmother Meralyn Kirkland told Fox affiliate WKMG in Orlando that she could not believe it when she was told her granddaughter was going to be taken to a juvenile facility. She said the child suffers from sleep apnea, and that she'd thrown a tantrum because she didn't get enough sleep the night before.
The girl ended up in the school office, where she kicked a school staffer who tried to grab her wrists to calm her down.
Kirkland said she was told her granddaughter was being charged with battery. However, the officer transporting her said she was taken back to school before she was processed at the juvenile facility.
The 8-year-old in the other incident, however, was processed and released to a family member. It's not clear what led to that child's arrest.
Orlando Police Chief Orlando Rolón said in a statement to the Post that according to department policy, arrests of minors under the age of 12 must first be approved by a supervisor and that as a grandparent of three children younger than 11 years old, the arrests were "very concerning to me."
Turner had been a police officer in Orlando for 23 years before he retired in June 2018 and is now assigned to the Reserve Officer Program.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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