A Broward Sheriff’s Office detention deputy was arrested Tuesday after a 911 call recorded him repeatedly hitting his wife, causing her to bleed internally and lose hearing in her ear, authorities say.
“Why are you smiling?” the victim asked him at one point, according to deputies.
“You really had the nerve to break my sh**,” he replied.
David Isaac Powell, 30, is now charged with three counts of aggravated battery, one count of felony battery and four counts of domestic battery after detectives determined that he had violently attacked his wife on Tuesday and multiple other times over the course of at least a year, leading her to require hospitalization and hide parts of his guns around the house out of fear for her safety, according to an affidavit in support of a risk protection order.
The Sheriff’s Office confiscated his guns Tuesday.
A little after 7 p.m. that evening, deputies responded to a 911 call with an open line in the 600 block of Southeast 15th Street in Dania Beach, according to the petition for the risk protection order. A woman could be heard screaming and crying and saying, “Stop, please don’t hit me.”
When deputies arrived at the home, they spoke to Powell, who told them the fight had only been verbal. His wife was not there when deputies arrived, having left with her two young children, one of whom is Powell’s, but she returned later. At first, she also told deputies that it was only a verbal argument.
Deputies then listened to the full 911 call, in which Powell’s wife repeatedly screamed for him to stop, followed by slapping sounds. She also asked him several times where her phone was.
“You walked into the bathroom on me,” the 911 call recorded Powell telling her at one point, according to the petition. “This is my reaction.”
“Leave me alone,” his wife said.
“This is my reaction,” Powell repeated, “and when you come back home, I’m going to do it again and I’m going to laugh and smile while I do it.”
As the attack continued, children could be heard crying in the background, according to the petition.
When deputies spoke to the victim’s mother, she told them Powell had been abusing her daughter for several years “and the violence was escalating.” The two had been married for four years and live with a 9-year-old and a 1-year-old.
In February, the victim had called her mother to ask her to come over, “code” that an incident with Powell had happened or was going to happen, according to the petition. When her mother arrived, she said she overheard her daughter saying Powell had choked her, kicked her, and hit her in the face, the petition says. When her daughter opened the door, she had a swollen lip and her face was bruised.
In another incident, Powell threw a Christmas tree in the house and destroyed it, the mother said. In another, her daughter got a concussion that her mother believed Powell had something to do with.
The victim had told her mother she had disassembled Powell’s guns and “placed each piece in different areas of the home” to “protect herself from him,” according to the petition.
The mother also told deputies that Powell was using steroids and that this would sometimes cause the “altercations.”
Eventually, the victim confessed to deputies that Powell had physically abused her, according to the petition. She said that Tuesday’s incident began with an argument because he had tracked dog excrement into the house. He went into the bathroom to clean his shoes and locked the door, and when the victim unlocked the door to brush her teeth, he slapped her “with so much force” that her ear rang and she still could not hear out of it.
She then said he began hitting her with a belt, then a large backpack, before she managed to find her phone and leave with the children.
The victim also showed deputies a “running log” of photographs of her injuries from a series of incidents dating to last March, according to the petition, including a laceration to her scalp that required stitches and a fractured nose sustained from him slamming her to the ground.
The victim went to the hospital on Tuesday, where she was diagnosed with intraabdominal bleeding, a concussion and a ruptured membrane in her eardrum, among other injuries. She was admitted overnight due to the severity of the injuries.
Detectives with the Special Victims Unit arrested Powell, who is being charged in relation to four different incidents involving his wife, including Tuesday’s. Deputies also “completed” a risk protection order and confiscated two handguns and an AR-15 at the scene, according to the petition.
Powell was hired by the Sheriff’s Office in December 2021.
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