As the
Broward County school district kept its mask mandate, a father trying to bring his maskless daughter to Fort Lauderdale High School Wednesday morning wound up in Broward County Jail.
Police say Dan Bauman, 50, grabbed and twisted the arm of a girl trying to stop him from using his cellphone to video-record students walking into the school.
On Wednesday, both the original probable cause affidavit and online jail records listed the charge against Bauman as aggravated child abuse. Thursday, an updated affidavit and jail record corrected the charge to abuse of a child without great bodily harm. Bauman posted $5,000 bond Thursday morning.
The Twitter account Miami Against Fascism posted a 24-second video of the incident. With the video shot from behind the girl and from several yards away, there’s not an unobstructed view of what happens.
The video follows the girl as she walks up to Bauman, who has school security and the school resource officer around him at one of the school’s entrances. She appears to grab for or swat at something in Bauman’s hands seven to eight seconds into the video. Bauman reacts to that with a move forward. What else he’s doing can’t be seen. At 10 seconds, school security and the SRO have grabbed Bauman. At 11 seconds, they’ve pulled him away and into a fence...
Wednesday wasn’t the first day for anti-mask mandate protesters, at whom some students chanted through a fence, “Wear a mask! Wear a mask!”
Nor, according to police, was it the first day Isabel, accompanied by her father, tried to enter the school without a mask.
School Resource Officer Paul Johnson wrote in the probable cause affidavit: “I activated my [body worn camera] because [Bauman] is known to cause disruption due to protesting the school’s mask policy.”
Johnson’s description of the incident says as Bauman was recording other students with his cellphone a girl walked up to him with, “I’ve had enough for four days,” and tried to grab Bauman’s cellphone.
Johnson wrote that the six-foot, 200-pound man then pushed the girl on her shoulder, grabbed one of her hands and began twisting her arm “in an aggressive manner, which caused me and the security guard to pull [Bauman] off the child.”
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