Police: Stepdad lied, staged ‘abuse’ photos
Back in October, a story out of Brevard County made national headlines.
The stepfather of a 7-year-old girl with Down syndrome claimed he had photographic evidence that school officials had used a nylon cord to forcibly strap a facemask around his daughter’s head against her will. He said it impeded her ability to breathe and put her life at risk.
The story sounded horrible. Especially when Brevard legislator Randy Fine — a guy always eager to bluster in front of TV cameras — declared the incident a case of government-ordered “child abuse” for which school officials should be condemned to hell.
Some media lapped it up, particularly the New York Post, London’s Daily Mail and Fox News. The stepfather even scored air time with Fox host Tucker Carlson, who concluded school officials “tortured” the little girl. Everyone was outraged. Except it turns out, the photos were staged. The stepdad lied about them — in a sworn statement to a police detective.
The stepfather had claimed his wife sent him photos of their involuntarily masked and distressed daughter after she stepped off the school bus. But after a detective told him that metadata proved the pictures were taken three days after he claimed, the stepfather admitted the pictures were taken “in an attempt to recreate” what had happened.
And the reason the little girl was wearing a mask was because the parents never followed the opt-out protocol the school offered families who didn’t want their kids to wear masks.
Oh, and that allegedly abusive mask tie? It was actually a little blue bow the school fashioned with a shoelace, connecting the mask’s two ear hooks
around her ponytail. The idea came from the Down Syndrome Resource Association as a way to keep masks on and yet also comfortable.
That’s all according to a remarkably thorough, 39-page report conducted by the Indian Harbour Beach Police Department.
The parents had demanded an investigation. Well, they got one. The detective conducted lots of interviews and pored through surveillance video to conclude the little girl was never in any danger, seemed happy and healthy in the mask and, in fact, got upset and threw a tantrum after her parents requested she not wear it anymore.
So here’s my question: Where’s the outrage now?
Where are all the press conferences? Gov. Ron DeSantis invited stepfather Jeffrey Steel to share his story at an October event attended by Brevard Sheriff Wayne Ivey and State Attorney Phil Archer. Will the governor be staging a follow-up event now to correct the record and issue stern lectures about lying to law enforcement?
And what about the media that blasted the abuse claims?
The Daily Mail, New York Post and Fox News trumpeted the unverified accusations as soon as they heard them. Yet two days after Florida Today broke the story last week about the police report and the Steels’ ‘discredited claims … crickets.
So I asked them Sunday if they planned on following up. Later that day, the Post and Fox News posted shorter stories, noting the police concluded no abuse took place.
But if these news organizations had spent five minutes looking up Randy Fine — the politician most eager to spread the story — they might have reconsidered their source.
Fine, after all, is the same guy who — when pitching a tantrum about a spending controversy at the University of Central Florida — suggested Florida shut down the entire school.
The same guy who once said he thought a bill that attempted to prevent social media companies from monitoring their own platforms would help out “Nazis and child molesters and pedophiles” and then voted for it anyway.
In other words: Anyone who did a lick of research on Fine would have trouble taking him seriously.
Fine’s real target in all this seems to be a Brevard County School Board member he despises. He has called her “mentally unwell,” said she belongs in jail and also should go to hell.
Fine is unrepentant, telling Florida Today that he still considers the case “child abuse.”
The facts may not matter to Fine. But they should matter to serious people, news outlets and public officials.
And the bottom line here, according to the investigation, is that the school used a method inspired by the Down Syndrome Resource Association to secure a mask on a little girl who seemed happy to wear it. And the reason the school did that was because her family “at no time” ever requested she be exempt from the school’s face mask rule — a request the school honored with other families who asked.
Steel, who said he never approved or knew about the mask, has raised more than $104,000 on a crowd-sourcing website, saying he hopes to raise $200,000 to pay for legal action against the school board.
At one point, Steel told the detective he had plans for a press conference “in front of 80-90 million people” and went on, the detective wrote, to describe “former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents being involved.”
I don’t know about 90 million people or CIA agents. But we do know the original story and photo weren’t as billed.
The police turned their investigation over to Archer, the state attorney who appeared at the governor’s October press conference with the stepfather — the one where Fine vowed retribution, saying: “There’s a special place in hell for these people who have done this to this man’s daughter.” A spokesman for Archer would not comment on the case but said Archer appeared at the press conference to talk about another issue and didn’t know the others who might be speaking.
One thing’s for sure: If some of these people had bothered to do the type of due diligence the police department did before those people started calling press conferences, penning stories and staging talk-show segments, the story would’ve had a very different feel. If the facts mattered, anyway.