CORAL SPRINGS, Fla. – Police arrested a 33-year-old Coral Springs man on multiple felony charges Monday after police said he followed a teenage girl in a mall parking lot and sexually assaulted her. He was a violent felon who wasn’t even supposed to be out in public, they said.
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According to an arrest report from the Coral Springs Police Department, the incident happened Sunday evening in the parking lot outside of Kohl’s, located at 9001 W. Atlantic Blvd. on the east side of Coral Square.
The report states that the 14-year-old was cutting through the mall parking lot after being denied access to a movie at the nearby Paragon Theatres when she noticed a man — later identified as Hosea Smith Jr. — walking with a woman and a child.
Police said the girl kept walking and listening to music and noticed Smith, who sports multiple face and neck tattoos, including one above his right eyebrow that says “crazy,” following her.
“Why are you following me?” she told police she asked him. Smith replied, “Because you look good,” the report states.
Police said he then asked the girl her age and told him his. The report states that the girl told Smith she was “way too young for him and to leave her alone because she was a kid.”
“The victim questioned where his wife and child were and (Smith) replied, ‘That doesn’t matter,’” CSPD Detective Michelle Gianino wrote in the report.
Authorities said Smith then dropped his pants, exposed his penis and grabbed the girl’s hair, trying to push her down towards it.
“The victim described a struggle of him ‘tossing her around’ and her pushing him off of her,” Gianino wrote.
Police said during the struggle, Smith took the girl’s cellphone and called himself from it so he could have her phone number.
The girl told police that she continued to struggle with Smith as he pulled down her shorts and underwear, bent her forward and “tried to put his thing up there,” the report states.
Authorities said the girl kept trying to pull her pants back up, but Smith would keep pulling them down. She told police that Smith touched her “all over her body” and “kissed her neck” amid the assault.
After the attack, police said the girl, with two of her friends, called Smith after seeing his then-unknown number as a missed call in her phone. They confronted him about what happened, authorities said. Her parents would later call police.
Much of the rest of the arrest report was redacted.
Police said they pulled over Smith, with his wife and child, after conducting surveillance Monday and took him into custody on charges of sexual battery, lewd and lascivious molestation and lewd and lascivious exhibition on a child, as well as a probation violation.
Smith, police said, is classified as a “Violent Felony Offender of Special Concern” on probation for burglary and grand theft at the time of his arrest Monday. He was supposed to be confined to his home on nearby Ramblewood Drive, the report states.
As of Tuesday, Smith was being held without bond in the Broward Main Jail facility in Fort Lauderdale.