As punishment for wetting himself when he was potty training, police allegedly locked their toddler kid in a cell.
They claim that on October 5, 2022, and again the following day, the police twice “incarcerated” their 3-and-a-half-year-old son.
The boy’s parents are still employed by the Daytona Beach Shores Police Department as an investigation into the incidents is ongoing, some nine months later.
The parents – the mother, detective Sgt Jessica Long, and the father, Lt Michael Schoenbrod – were interviewed by a state child abuse investigator, Law & Crime reported on Friday.
A Volusia County Sheriff’s deputy who escorted the investigator recorded the hour-long interview with a body camera and the footage was shared with the media earlier this week.
In the video, Long denies any wrongdoing and says ‘it’s just people getting it twisted’. She also labels the probe ‘the definition of insanity’.
Meanwhile, Schoenbrod said that his son’s day care requires that kids stop using diapers by age 3 and that he and his wife had exhausted options to potty train their toddler. That was when he decided to confront his son.
‘I said you know what I do for a living. I said I’m a cop. I take bad boys to the jail that don’t follow the law. So that’s what I did,’ the father said. ‘I said you know you aren’t following the rules, let’s go to jail.’
The cell was ‘nasty’, Schoenbrod said, adding that he checked it for contraband before locking up his son for about 13 minutes.
‘Had eyes on him the entire time,’ he said.
‘He was crying. I was getting the response I expected from him.’
Long had put their son in the cell the prior day for roughly three minutes, Schoenbrod noted.
Schoenbrod claimed to investigators that the move worked and that his son promised not to wet himself again.
It is not known who exposed the couple’s treatment of their son.
The father stated: ‘It’s just disgusting that somebody would drag our family through the mud like this.’
Most of the records in the case have been sealed by the county judge.
‘The city strives to always be open and transparent, however due to the court order that was issued to the city, we are unable to comment at this time,’ stated the city’s spokesperson Tammy Marzik.
It is apparently not the first time that the officer couple have used the tactic. Schoenbrod said that he put his older son in a jail cell about nine years ago when he admitted to hitting a girl in their preschool class.