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U.S. soldier Joshua Tabor waterboards his daughter, 4, because she couldn't recite alphabet: police
BY Helen Kennedy
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Originally Published:Monday, February 8th 2010, 9:05 AM
Updated: Monday, February 8th 2010, 11:02 AM
A crazed G.I. was arrested for waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter because she wouldn't say her ABCs.
Cops said Army Sgt. Joshua Tabor, 27, who served 15 months in Iraq, admitted to punishing his daughter by holding her down on the kitchen counter in suburban Washington State and repeatedly pushing her head backward into a full sink.
"He explained she's deathly afraid of water," said Todd Stancil, police chief in Yelm, Wash.
"He would lay her down on her back and push her head into the water right up to her eyeline. He was open about it. He did it all the time. To him, that was an acceptable form of punishment - because she wasn't able to say the alphabet."
Stancil said neighbors told cops that he also ran water over the flailing girl's face, taking her to the edge of drowning, but Tabor denied that.
"It was hot! The water was hot!" the girl said, according to the police report.
Tabor, who was arrested Jan. 31, will be arraigned Feb. 16.
"We originally booked him on third-degree assault, but if he did put the water over her face, that would constitute a more tortuous type of crime," Stancil said. "We are looking into those allegations."
Waterboarding, in which water is poured into an immobilized target's nose and mouth, was used by the CIA on prisoners in Iraq until President Obama banned it in January 2009.
Tabor is out on $10,000 bail and restricted to his base, Ft. Lewis, in Tacoma, Wash.
He was arrested after his girlfriend called the cops at 2 a.m. to say he was drunkenly stalking around the neighborhood brandishing his Kevlar helmet and threatening to break windows.
The girlfriend then told cops Tabor beat his daughter. Cops found the little girl hiding in the bathroom.
"She had just multiple bruises all over her body, from the ears to the legs," Stancil said. "She said, 'Daddy did this.'"
The child had only been in her father's court-ordered custody for two months.
Her father had barred her from contacting her mother's parents, who had raised her. When police put the worried grandma on the phone, the little girl cried from happiness, the police report says.
U.S. soldier Joshua Tabor waterboards his daughter, 4, because she couldn't recite alphabet: police
