During the holidays, women often shoulder the bulk of the housework, so it’s expected that family would help ease their workload. But for a Florida woman, the Christmas season turned into a felonious assault simply because she dared ask her husband for help with dinner.
According to the Lake County Sheriff’s office, 52-year-old Richard Daniel Atchison was arrested on felony charges after he threw a Christmas tree at his long-suffering wife after she asked him for help with the cooking.
Atchison was charged with violation of an injunction, false imprisonment, and domestic battery.
Police said that Atchison’s wife (who remains unnamed in the official reports) was making dinner in their home in Fruitland Park, Florida when she asked her husband for help—which made him angry. The wife also accidentally got him wet after dropping a spoon in the sink, making him even angrier. At this point, the man said he was going to pack up and leave the house.
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Instead of leaving, however, the Florida man decided he was going to stay, and his wife should be the one to leave, according to the police affidavit.
When she attempted to leave the house, he prevented her by using physical force. The shaken woman went back in and sat down with a friend who was visiting, and Atchison picked up the Christmas tree, breaking it in the process, and threw it at the woman over the kitchen countertop.
Atchison reportedly struck her. When she tried to escape and hide from him in a bedroom, he followed and tried to get in.
He was still shouting at her when officers arrived, according to the police affidavit.
This is not his first brush with the law: According to a police spokesperson, Atchison has been in jail 23 times since 1997, with 5 of those violations related to domestic violence.
