A clerk in Georgia is facing charges after she was caught on tape whipping a customer's child with a belt at the counter of a store she worked at.
ABC News reported that Emilia Graciela Bell, 39, who works at a Dollar General in Wrightsville, Georgia has been arrested for aggravated assault on 8-year-old Logan Ivey.
A police reported states that Bell admitted to whipping Logan with a belt after he threw a battery and cookie at her. ABC News reported that on Monday the charges were brought up to cruelty of children after investigators found additional footage of her hitting the child 16 to 18 more times than they thought.
"There were two different angles from different cameras in the store," Wrightsville Police Assistant Sheriff Bill Thompson said to ABCNews.com. "They'd only watched the first when they arrested Ms. Bell. After finding out another camera had caught it, you could see her striking the child 16 to 18 more times."
The boy had been at the store with his mother. Local news station 13WMAZ reported that Logan said to them, "It's just heartbreaking me that it happened two days before my birthday, it's just, I don't like it."
The child described the incident to 13WMAZ:
"So I walked down this aisle and I seen the lady. She started calling me a demon, so I said 'I'll show you bad' and I picked up a cookie and I threw it at her. So then she starts chasing me around the Dollar General with her belt and takes me behind the counter and starts beating me with her belt."
"I felt like I had five needles sticking in me, then it really hurt. I was screaming Momma," he added.
Logan's father Jody Ivey said he watched the surveillance.
"It wasn't a spanking, it was more or less a beating than a spanking the way she was hitting him. I don't know how to explain it and I don't want to think about it," he said to 13WMAZ. "I just wish everybody could see the video."
Dollar General released the following statement after the incident:
Dollar General strives to provide a safe and welcoming place for our customers to shop. We are deeply shocked and saddened by the reported incident at our store in Wrightsville, Ga and have expressed our sincere apologies to the child's family.
This incident is contrary to our core values of serving our customers and communities and does not reflect the commitment of our nearly 93,000 employees to treat everyone who enters our stores with kindness and respect. The type of behavior described in this incident is unacceptable, and the person responsible is no longer employed by Dollar General.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
