On Saturday, a Florida sheriff’s deputy and his wife were arrested and charged with abusing their children after their son apparently showed police pictures of his injuries.
Judges looked at court records and found that Christopher George Turney, a 40-year-old Escambia County sheriff’s deputy who was fired, and Leandra Childers Turney, 39, were charged with child neglect without great bodily harm and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor by failing to require school attendance. A second charge against the father is being mean to children.
According to the sheriff’s office, Christopher Turney had been an officer for a little over two years before he was fired after being arrested.
A police report that HuffPost obtained says Turney’s son, whose age was redacted from the report, went to a church on July 28 and told a minister that his father had been “physically abusive” and had punched him in the face, leaving him with bruises around the eye.
The report said the child “was afraid to tell his story because he thought ‘no one would believe me because [Turney is a cop.'” He told the police that Christopher Turney had also made fun of him because he was adopted and called him names.
The order says that the child also showed police pictures of bruises and skin irritations that he said were caused by his father.
The warrant said that the couple adopted the child in 2017. Since then, the child has not been to school or had any other official education, according to the police. The boy is also said to have told police that he had to give his dad the money he made by cutting grass.
It was also said that deputies talked to another child of the Turneys, who was born in 2019. The girl said she was taught for an hour or two a day, but the warrant says she didn’t know what grade she was in. It was also said that the daughter didn’t have a toothbrush and that her father was “saving up money” to buy her one. The officers said they saw that some of her teeth were black from decay.
Authorities said the girl told them she didn’t have a normal doctor and only went to the doctor when she was sick. They also said the former deputy had health insurance for his family that covered medical and dental care.
Christopher Turney said that he had not abused the kids and that his wife was teaching the three school-age kids at home. But he also said he’d help when she had to be out of town for work. The warrant said he told police that his daughter has a dentist appointment in Alabama in September.
The mother of Leandra Turney, who works as a dental assistant at a clinic near Pensacola, told police that she noticed the youngest child’s teeth were in bad shape in March and offered to help with dental care or finding in-network providers. But, she said, no one ever asked her for help, even though she had given the family toothbrushes, toothpaste, and other basic dental care things.
According to the request, the children’s grandmother also told police that she thought the kids’ bad teeth were due to not taking care of them.
The Turneys were freed on bond on Sunday afternoon, according to court records. They are due in court on August 23. When HuffPost asked an attorney named in the warrant for comment, they did not reply right away.
The warrant says that the kids were placed with a nearby non-profit group that helps kids at the time of their interview. It’s not clear if they were sent to another child protection agency or not, but cops say they are no longer living with the family. The cops and the care facilities would not say how many children were taken away from the home or how old they were.
The Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did the most recent study in 2021. It found that child protective service agencies in the U.S. got about 3,987,000 reports of child abuse and maltreatment that year, which is more than 7 million children. It was found that at least 76.8% of the people who hurt the victim were their own parents.