Miami tennis instructor Osmalier Torres, 30, was arrested in July 2016 on child abuse charges after getting caught on video striking a five-year-old with a mini-tennis racket
A tennis instructor from Miami charged with child abuse after getting caught on video striking a five-year-old boy with a racket is mounting a ‘stand your ground’ defense, claiming that he was trying to protect other children from the aggressive pre-schooler.
A lawyer for Osmalier Torres, 30, has filed a motion, first cited by Miami Herald, asking to have the case against his client dismissed, arguing that the man was acting in self-defense when he hit the child with a mini-tennis racket on a playground in Miami in the summer of 2016.
Torres, who works as a coach at Brickell Bay Club in Miami, was arrested in July of last year after surveillance videos capture the moment he wrestled away the racket from the five-year-old victim and hit him with it, causing a bruise on his right arm and a lump on his eyebrow.
The incident occurred on the playground at the First Presbyterian Church on Brickell Avenue.
This CCTV video shows the moment Torres grabs the racket and takes a swing at the boy, which he now says was an accident
Pre-schooler ‘aggressor’: The child suffered a bruise on his arm and a lump, but Torres’ attorney claims the five-year-old was the ‘initial aggressor’
Torres argued, through his attorney, Eduardo Pereira, that the five-year-old was the ‘initial aggressor’ and that he was defending his other students.
In his latest motion seeking ‘immunity’ under the state’s controversial ‘stand your ground’ self-defense law,’ Torres’ lawyer wrote that the victim had gotten into scraps with several other kids that day.
After being pulled aside, the motion alleged, the five-year-old lifted his mini-racket and was ‘poised to strike again against the other students’ and Torres himself.
Pereira insisted that his client, whom he described as a law-abiding, soft-spoken Sunday school teacher, never meant to strike the child, and that the blow was delivered by accident.
But prosecutors disagreed, claiming that the CCTV video that captured the altercation does not show the victim exhibiting any aggression toward the other children. They also disputed the defense lawyer’s claim that the boy himself considered the blow accidental.
The incident occurred on the playground at the First Presbyterian Church on Brickell Avenue
‘It is the state’s position that [Torres] was not acting under the imminent threat of danger to himself or others,’ Assistant State Attorney Gabriela Plasencia wrote in response to the motion.
A judge is expected to rule on the defense’s immunity motion early next year.
Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ law was first introduced in 2005 and made national headlines in 2012 in the context of the fatal shooting of unarmed black teen Treyvon Martin by George Zimmerman.