When a Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy responded to the call Tuesday night, the victim, a 16-year-old girl, was at the emergency room at AdventHealth Palm Coast (the former Florida Hospital Flagler). She was 34 weeks pregnant. And she was claiming that her boyfriend had punched her repeatedly on the head with his fists.





Tyler R. Torres, 18, of Roundtree Drive in Palm Coast, was eventually arrested and charged with aggravated battery on a pregnant woman, a felony, and booked at the Flagler County jail.

According to the alleged victim, the couple had gotten into an argument over drugs. The girl confronted Torres about allegedly using them, urging him to stop. In her telling, he walked away and shut the door in her face, and when she opened it, he punched her in the head and continued to do so after she “went down on the bed,” according to the arrest report, where he struck her on the head and on her body.

She pushed him back, scratching his face, at which point his 68-year-old grandmother intervened, separating them. The girl’s guardian drove the girl to the hospital, where a deputy noted that her face “was red and she had a mark on the left side of her head. It is unknown if her complexion in her face is from this incident.”

The grandmother gave a “conflicting statement” to the deputy, the deputy reported. She’d heard the couple argue about drugs, but said the girl was striking Torres and the girl was standing over him when the grandmother entered the room to separate them.

Torres was not at the house. He had reportedly gone to work at McDonald’s. Sheriff’s units were dispatched there to find him, but he’d left work before they arrived. He’d left because of “family problems,” the report states. But he agreed to return to the R-Section house from a friend’s place to speak with deputies. There, he “gave a bunch of different verbal statements on what happened,” claiming the girl had started to hit him, “and then she pulled a knife on him today” (Jan. 22). The day before, he claimed, she had tried to strangle him during an argument. The deputy noted no marks on Torres’s neck, but a scratch around the eye.

Deputies concluded he was the aggressor and charged him. He was booked at the jail around 2 a.m. on Jan. 23, posting bail on $1,500 bond by early afternoon that day. A judge ordered him to have no contact with the victim pending the resolution of the case, and to surrender any firearms, if any, to the sheriff’s office. He is scheduled for arraignment on Feb. 25 before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins.