Mother Arrested For Potato Sack Attack On Son
Cops: Floridian, 46, clobbered cowering boy, 12
MAY 28--A mother whacked her 12-year-old son in the head with a sack of potatoes and then pelted the boy with the vegetable as he cowered behind a toilet in the family’s Florida home, police allege.
According to investigators, the victim last night asked Rachel Salters, 46, to “make him some dinner,” a request that “started a verbal argument which led to Salters picking up a full 
bag of potatoes.”
As Salters, seen above, allegedly began striking the child in the head with the potatoes, he “went into the bathroom where he locked the door.” Salters, “in a sense of enragement,” then kicked the door until it broke open, according to a Volusia County Sheriff’s Office report.
Once inside the bathroom, Salters, who is nicknamed “Rae Rae,” resumed hitting the child in the head with the sack of potatoes. “When the bag broke open, Salters picked up several potatoes off of the bathroom floor and began throwing them” at the boy, who was in the fetal position between the toilet and the shower.
The child was not injured during the confrontation at the Orange City home.
When a deputy questioned Salters about the bathroom door’s broken frame, she replied, “I don’t know.” She offered a similar response when asked about a potato that cops found on the bathroom floor.
Following her arrest, Salters reportedly shouted, “I didn’t hit him with the potato, I only threw it at him!” After being placed in a patrol car, an “extremely hostile and aggressive” Salters claimed that it was not a crime to hit the boy, and reiterated that she “only threw potatoes at him.”
Salters was charged with felony child abuse and tampering with evidence (for removing a potato from the home’s bathroom after being told by cops not to touch anything in the room). She is being held in lieu of $11,500 bond, according to jail records.
The victim was temporarily placed in the custody of a state child welfare investigator who planned on releasing the boy to Salters’s husband (who himself was arrested last month for battery). (2 pages)
