DEPUTY NOT GUILTY OF CHOKING A CHILD
Sheriff’s Sgt. Roger Aaron Kirby now wants to get back in uniform.
WEST PALM BEACH — It took a jury less than an hour Friday to acquit a Palm Beach County sheriff ’s sergeant on aggravated child abuse charges tied to allegations he routinely abused his girlfriend’s 5-year-old son and once, after the boy wet the bed, put him in a chokehold used to restrain inmates.
A pair of convictions for Roger Aaron Kirby, 41, would have brought a sentence of up to 35 years in prison. Now, with the jury’s quick exoneration on one count each of child abuse and aggravated child abuse, defense attorney Michael Salnick will work to get Kirby back in uniform. The sergeant has spent the past three years on unpaid administrative leave.
“My client was not just not guilty, he was innocent,” Salnick said after the verdict, speaking on Kirby’s behalf when he declined to talk to reporters. “He and his family are glad this nightmare is over.”
In the trial that began earlier this week with Circuit Judge Cheryl Caracuzzo presiding, Assistant State Attorneys Takisha Richardson and Chrichet Mixon tried unsuccessfully to convince jurors that Kirby was the one who personified a living nightmare for his girlfriend’s son.
The boy, now 9, testified about a pattern of abuse he suffered at the hands of the man he knew as Aaron, saying that much of the abuse surrounded the fact that he still wet the bed.
Among the allegations were that Kirby once shoved a wet diaper in the child’s face after he soiled it and would routinely make him stay in the bathroom for hours — at times forcing him to jump up and down in front of the toilet, to curb accidents.
The boy said the abuse culminated with a violent reaction from Kirby one night after he wet the bed in April 2014. His description of the inescapable hold around his face and neck, prosecutors said, was consistent with restraint techniques Kirby learned in his work as part of the jail’s version of a SWAT team used to subdue violent inmates.
“I tried to get out but he was too strong,” Mixon said, repeating the boy’s words on the witness stand earlier this week, in her final arguments before jurors
began deliberating Friday.
The boy was brought to the hospital that day with hemorrhaging around his eyes and a swollen lip. A doctor who examined him concluded the injuries were consistent with having been choked. But Salnick and a medical expert who testi- fied on Kirby’s behalf said the doctors didn’t conduct enough testing and it was possible that a blood disor- der or other illness could have caused the injuries.
If Salnick’s claims that the boy’s father fed him the abuse allegations were true, Richardson told jurors, then it would have had to have been a conspiracy between the father’s family, doctors and even one of his teachers.
The boy’s teacher testified that as she was teaching the children the biblical story of Saul’s transformation to Paul on the road to Damascus, the 5-year-old quickly iden- tified with the story and told his teacher that there was a “good Aaron” and “mean Aaron.” The former, the boy said, was the one who put on a uniform and worked as a deputy. The latter abused him and came into his room and whispered in his ear at night.
Kirby, Richardson said, found the boy “disgusting, retarded and thought he’d been coddled way too much.”
The prosecutors also dismissed denials from the boy’s mother on the witness stand that Kirby had abused her son, describing her as “loyal to a fault.”
One of the last witnesses was Kirby himself, who gave a very different account of the alleged choking incident. He said he merely woke up early that day and found the boy standing in front of the mirror, pulling his lip down. He said the boy hadn’t even wet the bed that night and he thought nothing of it.
“I turned on ‘SportsCenter’ and got ready to go to work,” Kirby said.
Salnick later told jurors that Kirby had been eager to testify and had none of the behaviors of a guilty man.
Why, for example, Salnick asked jurors Friday, would a man guilty of the things Kirby was accused of still visit the boy in the hospital once, then return for a sec- ond visit even after the allegations surfaced.
“Because I knew it wasn’t true,” Kirby said when Salnick asked him. “I didn’t think I had anything to worry about.”
Kirby, who lived in Wellington at the time the allegations surfaced, joined the
This was Kirby’s second brush with the law during his time as a law enforcement officer.
Sheriff ’s Office in 2004. He started as a corrections deputy, then worked as a K-9 officer with the jail’s Corrections Emergency Response Team before he moved to the agency’s training department.
This is Kirby’s second brush with the law during his time as a law enforcement officer. In February 2012, he was arrested after he allegedly slammed his girlfriend against an aluminum bi-fold door during an argument.
Kirby told deputies that he and his girlfriend had argued about his 2-year-old daughter. The girlfriend, whose name was not released, said they had argued over Kirby’s drug use, according to the arrest report. Court records show that prosecutors declined to seek charges against him in that case.
On Friday, Salnick said he didn’t have a timeline for how quickly Kirby would be allowed to return to the Sheriff ’s Office.