14 DAY TRIAL // A Dollar General Store employee from Wrightsville, Georgia has been charged with aggravated assault and cruelty towards children for whipping a customer's son 25 times.
The Atlanta Business Chronicle writes that 39-year-old Emilia Graciela Bell has been caught on camera disciplining the child.
According to Wrightsville Police Chief Paul Sterling analyzing the footage, an 8-year-old boy visiting the store with his mother and sister was hit with a belt behind counter.
As he was running around the store, Bell asked him to stop, calling him a “demon.” He responded by throwing a cookie at the attendant.
Bell reacted to the boy's tantrum by taking off her belt and hitting him several times, when his family was not looking her way.
“I felt like I had five needles sticking in me; it really hurt. I was screaming, Mama. [...] And I was crying real bad because she [the clerk] had actually hurt me…when she stopped whipping me, my pants were actually a little bit warm,” Logan Ivey recalls in an interview with WMAZ Macon.
Logan's father Jody Ivey explains that his son wasn't just spanked, describing the incident as a proper beating.
“It wasn't a spanking, it was more or less a beating than a spanking the way she was hitting him. I don't know how to explain it and I don't want to think about it,” Ivey argues.
News One quotes a statement issued by Dollar General reps, in which they mention that Bell has been fired.
“This incident is contrary to our core values of serving our customers and communities and does not reflect the commitment of our nearly 93,000 employees to treat everyone who enters our stores with kindness and respect.
“The type of behavior described in this incident is unacceptable, and the person responsible is no longer employed by Dollar General,” it reads.