Police say a man was caught after a shocking video showed him suffocating a 10-year-old boy at a Sunny Isles Beach park.
There was an arrest record for Robert Sandy Marcu, 60, on Monday. He was charged with battery by strangulation and aggravated child abuse.
The claimed event took place at Gwen Margolis Park after two got into some kind of fight.
From what the report says, the victim’s father said that his son was playing with water guns at the park with another child when Marcu, the father of the other child, grabbed his son by the neck and “shook him around while still holding his neck.”
Police put out a video of a man they said was Marcu shaking the boy very hard while holding him by the neck.
“Well there were two kids basically playing, like children do, at one of our parks, and at some point they became involved in some type of altercation, child’s play between each other, nothing violent to our knowledge, at that time one of the parents of one of the children decided to intervene and take matters into his own hands,” Sgt. Melissa Porro of Sunny Isles Beach said. “He went ahead and approached the other child and proceeded to choke this child and violently choke him, causing this child to be extremely fearful and crying and very upset.”
The boy had cuts and red marks on his neck from the fight, according to the police. Marcu was later caught and jailed.
“As officers went ahead and took him into custody he basically spontaneously told the officers, ‘yeah, I know what I did, I needed to teach him a lesson,'” I said Porro. “You can see from this video that you have a fully grown, tall, large man against this young, helpless child, so yes, absolutely, this child could’ve been seriously injured.”
Marku was taken to jail. No more details have not been revealed by the authorities.
The boys go to the same school, but the police aren’t sure if the families know each other.
Porro said it’s never okay for an adult to grab a kid like that, especially if it’s not their own child. He said the right thing to do would be to talk to the parents about it in a calm way, or even call the parents and let them handle it.