This article was originally published on September 21, 2016 by David Lohr on Huffington Post
Photos of a man who appears to be dragging a little girl by the hair through a Texas shopping center are causing a firestorm on social media.
“Somebody needs to pull him down the road by the hair,” one commenter wrote. “Makes me sick.”
“I would have been the one going to jail, because I would beat the fuck out of him,” wrote another.
The uproar began after Erika Burch posted the photos to her Facebook page on Monday.
Burch, a 24-year-old mother of four, said she was shopping at a Walmart in the Cleveland, Texas, area earlier that day when she noticed a man had his young child’s hair wrapped around the handle of a shopping cart he was pushing.
“I saw this little girl slouched over and her dad was gripping her hair on the cart while he shopped,” Burch told The Huffington Post Wednesday by phone. “She was crying and begging him to stop. I said, ‘Oh, hell no.’”
Burch said she immediately went over and confronted the man.
“I said, ‘Hey, you need to let go of her hair,’” she recounted. “He looked at me and said, ‘No, bitch, you need to mind your business.’ I said, ‘No, this is my fucking business’ and I got my phone out.”
The angry mom said the man continued to push the cart, dragging the child along with it. She snapped photos of him while another shopper called the Cleveland Police Department. When officers arrived on the scene, they took a report from Burch.
Later, after officers questioned the man, Burch says a sergeant with the Cleveland Police Department told her they were unable to arrest him, because the child had no visible injuries.
“I was livid,” she said. “The cop had seen the photos on my phone. I told him, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me, this is abuse, not discipline.’”
After leaving the store, Burch took to social media, posting the photos and writing, “PLEASE MAKE THIS GO VIRAL!!!!!!”
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