New video shows incident that led to child cruelty charges by a Catoosa County teacher

CATOOSA COUNTY, Ga. – New video shows a confrontation between a teacher and a Catoosa County student that resulted in the teacher facing child cruelty charges.

Kimberly Shea Malone, a Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe (LFO) high school teacher, turned herself in Monday to charges of child cruelty in the first degree. But her lawyer says these charges are a “rush to judgment.”

According to an arrest report, the incident she is accused of occurred last Friday at school. School officials say the incident involved “a student attempting to leave the stadium during the day.”

Malone’s attorney, Tonya Craft, says further investigation is necessary before the arrest.

“We talked to her, we said Scott and I would call the detective and we did. We were kind of told, ‘It really doesn’t matter what she says, we’re going to arrest her.'”

On Thursday, we received surveillance footage of the October 4 incident from the LFO administration:

The video shows a student trying to push past Malone and another teacher to leave the stadium.

Malone then grabs the student’s backpack and tries to drag her back into the stadium.

In the video, Malone is seen raising her arms as she speaks and the student pushes her arms down to get through.

The video shows Malone grabbing the student’s arm and pulling her back toward the stadium.

But the student goes around the teachers and walks away quickly.

We asked the school if they had a video of what happened in the minutes leading up to the clip they sent us. The human resources manager told us that the video we received was from the school camera. He told us that what they sent was the totality of what they had. He also said a student recorded another video that was turned over to law enforcement.

A separate report from Malone said she told a deputy that she was working with three other teachers to monitor an event on the soccer field.

According to the report, a student wanted to leave the event and Malone and other staff told her she could not do so.

According to the report, the student then began “abusing and aggressively using her body.”

As the student exited the stadium, teachers contacted the SRO and school administration about the student, according to the report.

The report said the SRO stated it would assign someone to follow up and investigate.

In a statement on Wednesday. Malone’s attorney Tonya Craft told us…

“Our position is based on several eyewitness statements that the attacker was the student. However, the investigator did not speak to the eyewitnesses prior to Kim Malone’s arrest.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.