A Pensacola (Fla) woman will not be charged for viciously paddling a middle school age boy in a restaurant parking lot.
A concerned citizen caught the paddling on her cell phone and uploaded the video to social media. The video quickly garnered over 70,000 views from outraged parents.
Shannon Holmes, who witnessed the beating in a Golden Corral parking lot, also took down the woman’s license plate number, according to ABC3 News.
“In my head I’m just thinking, like, ‘this can’t be real,'” Holmes told a reporter. “This is something you see on TV. This is not something that you necessarily see in person, let alone in daylight in a very public place,” Holmes added.
Holmes said she could see the fear in the boy’s eyes as as the woman menacingly wielded the paddle. The woman is Caucasian and the boy is black.
“You could see the fear in his eyes, like this isn’t his first time going through this. So, once he turned around again, she swatted him again. She hit him again, then she threw the board in her vehicle, and they went right back into the restaurant like nothing ever happened,” Holmes said.
“My first instinct was to get out of the car, but I thought to myself, ‘if I get out of the car and interrupt, and she did this in public, he’s probably going to get it ten times worse when he gets home.'”
Holmes was in disbelief when the woman repeatedly paddled the boy and he fell to the ground.
She said there are better ways to discipline children effectively that doesn’t involve violence.
“I feel like by me videotaping and getting her tag, I could do something to possibly help that child, because he obviously doesn’t have a voice where he could speak for himself and tell what’s going on. I feel like I should be that child’s voice because that’s so not right,” said Holmes.
Pensacola’s Channel 3 News alerted authorities about the child abuse. The Pensacola Police Department and DCF contacted the woman and the 10-year-old boy, but police found no wrongdoing and the woman was not charged.
Corporal punishment is illegal in many states.
Watch the disturbing video below.
