Former Major League Baseball slugger Josh Hamilton turned himself in to Tarrant County, Texas, authorities on Wednesday on a felony charge of injury to a child, CBS DFW reported.
Hamilton, who spent five seasons with the Texas Rangers and won the American League MVP award in 2010, is charged with hitting and scratching his daughter in a September 30 incident in which he also told her to “go in front of the f*cking judge and tell him what a terrible dad I am so I don’t have to see you anymore and you don’t ever have to come to my house again.”
According to an affidavit, all three of Hamilton’s children were present when the incident took place, and the two younger children corroborated what the oldest told Child Protective Services had happened, WFAA reported.
The oldest told interviewers that she made a comment that upset her father, and he “threw a full water bottle at her in an overhand motion which hit her in the chest,” the affidavit said. She said Hamilton was “cussing and yelling at her” and pulled a chair out from under her feet and threw it at her. She fell, landing on her hip, and Hamilton, who is 6-foot 4-inches tall and weighs 250 pounds, allegedly threw her over his shoulder and carried her to her bedroom while she called out “I’m sorry.”
In the bedroom, he threw the girl on the bed face down and hit her legs with an open hand and a fist, then picked her up by her sweatshirt and pushed her back onto the bed, hitting her again on the back and legs.
According to court records, Hamilton’s ex-wife, Katie Hamilton, filed for a temporary restraining order against him for the daughter.
Hamilton’s attorney released a statement noting the ball player had voluntarily surrendered. “Mr. Hamilton is innocent of the charge against him and looks forward to clearing his name in court,” the statement said.
Hamilton’s bond was set at $35,000, and he was ordered to have no contact with any child under the age of 17.
Hamilton, from Raleigh, North Carolina, was drafted out of high school in 1999 by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and played with that club’s minor league teams. But an automobile accident in 2001 left him struggling with addiction as well as his baseball career. He was out of the game for three years and returned in 2007, only to be dropped by the Rays at the end of spring training. He ended up with the Cincinnati Reds, where he nearly won Rookie of the Year, and was traded to the Rangers at the end of the season.
His five years with the Rangers were stellar — he was named to the AL All Star team all five years and led the team to the World Series twice. Hamilton left the Rangers at the end of the 2012 season for the Angels and returned to the Rangers in 2015, but injuries saw him released at the start of the 2017 season.
Hamilton said in 2008 that he’d gotten clean and sober in 2005. He relapsed in 2009, 2012, and 2015. He and Katie Chadwick married in 2004 and divorced in 2015.
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[Featured images: Josh Hamilton mugshot/Tarrant County and Texas Rangers 2016/AP]
