A man in Georgia got 30 years in jail for hitting and “horribly bruising” his kids because they didn’t clean their room.
The district attorney’s office for the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit says that Dillan Michael Tennant, 24, was found guilty by a jury in Catoosa County, Georgia, last month of two counts of abuse to children in the first degree.
Police say the Georgia man got very angry between March 14 and March 16, 2023, after his 2-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter made a mess in their bedroom. Rossville is a small town in the Chattanooga, Tennessee, metro area. The father and his two children were living there with his father, mother, and brother at the time.
Investigators said that after finding the kids in the messy room, he would beat them over and over again in the days that followed. The office of the district attorney said, “Tennant got angry because the kids made a mess in the bedroom while he wasn’t watching them properly.” Over the course of two days, Tennant hit the kids several times.
Police also said the father hit his son with a “board” and that he “beat them repeatedly” and “left horrific bruising on the toddlers.” A press statement said, “Tennant then left the home he shared with the children’s grandparents and uncle and took the children to the home of a male friend to try to hide the injuries he had caused to his children.”
When the Georgia man got home with his badly bruised kids from being hit for not cleaning their room, his parents called the police right away. When the cops arrived, they questioned the man from Georgia, but he denied having anything to do with the kids’ injuries. His claim instead was that “another family member was likely responsible for the injuries.” He had “admitted to observing the severity of the injuries on his own children,” but he “never attempted to seek medical treatment for them.” This made him look even less trustworthy.
During Tennant’s trial, several child safety workers said that the injuries his two kids had were some of the worst they had ever seen in their jobs. In court, a doctor said that none of the injuries could have been caused by chance and that they could only have been caused by “repetitive strikes using a great degree of force.”
After being caught, the man from Georgia was found guilty of two counts of first-degree cruelty to children and given a sentence of 30 years in state jail. Besides that, he was told to serve the first 15 years without the chance of release.
The man was also told by Judge Chris Arnt that he could not have any contact with his children or any other children without being watched. Around the same time, District Attorney Clayton M. Fuller said, “This child abuser will have plenty of time to clean his room in the Department of Corrections.”
