photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured on Nov. 25, 2025.

A Douglas County judge will soon decide whether to order a man to stand trial for child abuse after a store’s video camera captured him striking a young boy repeatedly with a belt.

The state at Tuesday’s preliminary hearing for the man portrayed the incident as a violent felony, while the man’s appointed attorney sought to characterize it as parental discipline of a child with extremely difficult behavioral challenges.

The incident occurred last fall at the Dollar General at 1940 Haskell Ave., where the man’s family had gone to shop the evening of Nov. 8. The boy’s mother testified for the state Tuesday that the incident began when the 7-year-old asked for a Lego set at the store. When he was denied, he threw a tantrum and started angrily pushing and hitting her, she said. She then exited the store with her other child and told the father to handle the boy and get him to the car.

A Dollar General employee testified that he heard an adult and a child yelling “a lot louder than usually occurs,” but he couldn’t immediately check on the situation because he was helping customers at the register. He then heard the child screaming “unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.” When he made his way to the candy aisle, where the noise was coming from, he saw a man with a belt in his hand and concluded that “something dire” had happened.

Customers had gravitated to the scene and said they were going to call police. One woman testified that she heard the commotion from the back of the store and went to see what was happening. She said she saw a “very upset” child, red in the face, crying, and a man with a belt in his hand. She described the man’s demeanor as “very irate — screaming, yelling.”

“What are you doing? You can’t do that,” she said she told the man with the belt, to which she said he replied, “I can do whatever I want.”

Meanwhile, the store employee went in the backroom and viewed video recorded by one of the store’s 16 security cameras. That video — minus audio — was played in court Tuesday morning. In it a child writhes on the floor while a grown man attempts to hold him in place and strikes him on the backside with a belt. Customers gather around, and the man’s wife re-enters the store, interacts with the father and son as they struggle, then, as more people gather, points to the man to indicate he should leave.

When police arrived, they found the boy “very upset.” Lawrence Police Officer Eric Stockman testified that the boy told him that his dad had tried to “scare” him back into the car and had lifted him by his hoodie, choking him, then struck him across the backside with his belt. Stockman said that the boy said he did not feel safe around his father. When police pulled up the back of his shirt, Stockman said, they saw fresh red marks just above the boy’s buttocks as well as what Stockman considered older bruising, which the boy’s mom had earlier testified came from a fall.

Stockman said he also spoke to the father, who indicated that he sometimes used a belt for discipline, but not on a regular basis, and that he would take responsibility for his actions. He told Stockman that he was disciplining his child so that the child wouldn’t have run-ins with the police in later life, Stockman testified.

The man’s appointed defense attorney, Jennifer Amyx, questioned why only the incident itself was on the video shown to the court and not video from the moments leading up to the incident, which she suggested would provide more context about the boy’s behavior. Stockman said that once he saw the belt video he knew he had an “arrestable offense” and he admitted that he did not collect additional video.

Amyx filed a motion for special findings in the case, but Judge Amy Hanley had not received it before the preliminary hearing. In the motion, Amyx detailed how the boy, though undiagnosed, is prone to violent physical and emotional outbursts, sometimes hurting himself and others.

He is on medication to control anger and has been expelled from school, his mother testified. His outbursts are such that he “turns into this tornado,” wailing, throwing things, hitting himself in the face.

“He screams at the top of his lungs, bangs his head into the ground and kicks out striking anyone or anything nearby. (The father) fears for his son’s safety now, and for his future ability to conform to societal expectations,” Amyx wrote in her motion, which seeks a dismissal of the case.

The boy, she wrote, was not physically injured, and the state lacked evidence of torture or cruelty as required by the statute the father was charged under. Both, she argued, “are utterly absent from this case.”

The father, she said, should be entitled to use the parental discipline defense available at common law.

Prosecutor Eve Kemple countered that “the law is that parental discipline is not a defense” to child abuse, and added that physical harm is not required by the statute since abuse can also be emotional and mental.

Judge Hanley did not make a probable cause ruling Tuesday but ordered the parties to submit briefs on the legal issues involved. Hanley will make her ruling on March 6. In the meantime, she modified conditions of the man’s bond so that he can interact via Zoom twice a week with his young daughter; with his son he can have no contact whatsoever.

The Journal-World is not naming the defendant out of concern for the children’s privacy.