A Lauderhill man, wearing a ski mask and carrying a baseball bat, ambushed a woman in the parking lot of a Pompano Beach apartment complex, deputies said; she was five months pregnant with his child.
The incident happened Friday near the 1200 block of South Dixie Highway West, according to an arrest report obtained by Local 10 News on Tuesday.
A Broward judge found probable cause to charge Emmanuel Prevaly, 34, with attempted murder.
According to the Broward Sheriff’s Office arrest report, the woman was walking in her apartment complex when the masked man “began to speedwalk toward her with a red bat.”
He said nothing as he beat her on her head and arms with the metal bat and kicked her stomach with his feet, deputies said. They said she would only find out later that the man attacking her was the father of her child.
“He was going crazy!”, she told BSO Detective So Hyon Kim from her hospital bed at Broward Health North, according to the report.
The victim told Kim that she didn’t fight back but pleaded with Prevaly to stop, the detective wrote. During the attack, she said her iPhone fell to the ground and she told Siri to call 911, at which point Prevaly grabbed it an attempt to keep authorities from responding.
However, deputies said neighbors heard the commotion and the victim’s pleas for help. One called 911, they said, while another chased after Prevaly, who ran after neighbors came out.
The report states with the neighbor running after him, Prevaly hopped a fence. The neighbor also jumped the fence and followed him.
Deputies said Prevaly threw the red bat and a cellphone at the man in an attempt to keep him off his tail, but the neighbor would catch him and wrestle him to the ground, at which point Prevaly pleaded, “You don’t understand. I know her. Let me go, I’ll pay you, man.”
The neighbor did not let him go and deputies took Prevaly into custody.
The victim suffered spinal fractures and a deep laceration that required stitching, according to the report.
Kim wrote that she was in “complete shock” after finding out that Prevaly was the man behind the mask. According to the report, the victim said she’s known him since she was 8 and began to date him when he was released from prison; they’re also co-workers. The woman, who has four other children, not by Prevaly, said she didn’t reside with him.
Deputies said Prevaly, after initially finding out the victim was carrying his child, had told her he was “not ready” and “did not welcome the news.”
Still, they said he accompanied her to a pregnancy check-up in Boca Raton on Feb. 16. The woman told deputies that the day before the attack, Prevaly had called her up “ranting about having to pay child support.”
Preval, in an interview with detectives, denied attacking the woman, the report states, saying someone else did it.
“Why am I hurting her for?” Kim said he asked. “She’s carrying my son.”
According to the Florida Department of Corrections, Prevaly’s release from prison came in 2020. In March 2011, a judge sentenced him to more than 10 years in prison on four robbery charges and one charge of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
Now, in addition to the attempted murder charge, Prevaly faces a witness tampering charge for hindering the woman’s ability to call 911, according to the arrest report.
He’s being held without bond in the BSO Main Jail as of Tuesday.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the date the incident occurred.
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Source: local10
