A 50-year-old man accused of impregnating a 13-year-old surrendered Thursday in Volusia County, one day after an arrest warrant was issued, according to Daytona Beach police.

An arrest warrant was issued Wednesday for Robert Lee Bellamy Jr., for lewd or lascivious battery on a victim less than 12 years of age.

The victim told investigators Bellamy had sex with her "eight or nine times" since 2012, according to a charging affidavit.

The sexual abuse began in 2011 in DeLand, a report states. The girl had the baby in August.

Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood called the crime "unfathomable."

The investigation began in the spring when the teenager told her mother she was pregnant. The girl initially lied about the father, police said. But the mother noticed dozens of phone calls from Bellamy on the phone bill.

Bellamy is a man the family has known since 2005, police said.

"In my 27-plus years of law enforcement service, this is probably one of the most disgusting, despicable, cowardly acts that I can think of," Chitwood said Thursday. "Basically, the investigation shows he started grooming this girl when she was a very young girl. ... When they moved over to Daytona Beach, he followed her over."

Police said Bellamy would follow the family whenever they moved to a different apartment complex.

When the baby was born in August, detectives immediately tested the DNA. Those results came back Wednesday, and it was a match Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab analysts said they'd only get in 1 in 18 million random samples.

Bellamy surrendered just after 5 p.m. Thursday. When he was being booked at the Daytona Beach Police Department, Bellamy denied to reporters that he had sex with the girl. When asked if he was the baby's father, he said, "That's what the papers say."



"I got to tell you ... you got to be a real scumbag to attack a child like that," Chitwood said. "It turns your stomach, any of us that have daughters would say he's lucky he's arrested and walking into a jail cell in the criminal justice system."



Bellamy has been locked up in the Volusia County Branch Jail on a bond of $100,000.

