Mom uses seat belt to tie boy to car then drags him on highway as punishment, cops say
A Texas woman is accused of tying her son to the side of a car by his seat belt and dragging him down a highway to punish him, officials say.
The Archer County Sheriff’s Office received a call from a witness around 11 a.m. on May 2, claiming to have seen the alleged abuse taking place on state Highway 79, near Wichita Falls, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
A deputy pulled over the vehicle and spoke to the boy’s mother, documents read. She denied dragging him, saying that there was “a verbal altercation” after the boy insulted her, and that “she was waiting on the child to apologize.”
The deputy told the boy he should apologize to his mother and he let them go, documents said.
However, the deputy later pulled over the car a second time, at the request of Sheriff Jack Curd, who had just received videos captured by a witness who passed by the mother and son along Highway 79, documents said.
In the videos, according to the affidavit, the boy is seen outside the car with a seat belt wrapped around him, effectively tying him to the side of the vehicle.
He’s forced to run alongside the car as his mother drives, slamming on the breaks, then stepping on the gas, documents said. One video shows the boy clinging to the car and lifting his feet off the ground, trying not to fall.
The woman said her son “would not get out of the road and she had to do something to control him,” according to the affidavit.
The deputy took her information and cleared the call — but she was arrested later that day on a charge of endangering a child, jail records show.
Investigators believe the woman’s actions “placed the child in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury,” documents said.
She was released from the Wichita County Jail on May 3, on $100,000 bond, KFDX reported.
Wichita Falls is roughly 110 miles northwest of Fort Worth.
