Commendable Restraint, Dad

(Story updated at 8:00 PM 9/12/08 - link below changed to point to the article directly on the West Volusia News website.)

What do you do when you find a naked male in your teenage daughter's room? A 45-year-old father in Deltona answered that question with a metal pipe. After hearing noises coming from his daughter's room, he opened the door to discover her boyfriend standing in the bedroom. Naked. Not only did Dad not know his baby girl had a boyfriend, he was unaware the boy had been sneaking into the home for more than a year.

Deltona Dad chased the still naked boy from the home and onto the streets of Deltona, in the process inflicting a head injury with the pipe that required hospital care to treat. The dad was charged with "aggravated battery on a child", and bonded out on $10,000.

I'm not a legal scholar, but I am a Dad. It seems to me that if any aggravation took place in this scenario it was on the part of the young naked man in his daughter's bedroom. If anything, the father is to be commended for displaying commendable restraint in that he left the youth in a condition that was treatable rather than fatal.

Take it to trial. The trial ought to last all of about ten minutes. Explain that he had no idea who the boy was, only that there was a naked male in his precious baby's bedroom. As any right-thinking father who loves his family would do, Deltona Dad took prompt action to preserve his daughter from unknown but potentially great personal harm.

If even one member of the jury has - or ever had - a teenage daughter, Deltona Dad walks.