A concerned father woke with a feeling that he should check on his daughter in her bedroom down the hall. It was after 3 a.m. when he walked into her room, and he didn’t expect to happen on the scene that he found. Now, the dad is sitting in prison.
When Ben Batterham put his little girl to bed on Saturday night, he didn’t think he would wake to a nightmare just hours later. Suddenly alert at 3:30 in the morning, he walked to his daughter’s bedroom.
When he cracked open her door, he saw that she was in her bed, but to his absolute horror, a massive man was standing over his daughter, as she lay helpless and terrified beneath his towering wrath.
According to Yahoo News, the 33-year-old Australian father didn’t ask questions. His protective parental instinct instantly took over, and he grabbed the 34-year-old intruder, identified as Ricky Slater, with his bare hands, beating him to a bloody pulp. Batterham dragged the pervert out of his daughter’s room in a headlock and into the street to detain him until police arrived. Once cops got there, Slater’s neck was snapped in half and he was unconscious.
The intruder was transported to the hospital where he died the following morning, after being removed from life support. Despite getting what he deserved when he entered a child’s bedroom with bad intentions, Batterham is paying a dear price for protecting his daughter.
The courageous father was initially charged with recklessly causing grievous bodily harm, but that has since been upgraded to murder since Slater’s death. The intruder’s family is coming to their degenerate son’s defense, blaming Slater’s bad actions on Batterham, claiming he was a good guy and loving father, who didn’t deserve to die.
Seeking justice for her now three fatherless grandchildren, Slater’s mother, Beryl Dickson, is pushing the court to not be kind on Batterham. “They’ve lost their father, their beautiful father that they haven’t seen for years because he was in jail, which has nothing to do with this case,” Dickson told ABC News. “Just to think those little kids are going to grow up without a dad now.”
Perhaps this mother should have stopped making excuses for her son’s horrible decisions years before it got to this point. If she had, he could have been a father to his children. It’s not the victim’s fault the criminal was killed in committing a crime, that’s a risk he faced when he chose to creep on a little girl, and it’s the father’s right to protect her.
Considering Slater’s pedophile tendencies, his kids are probably better off without him. By Dickson’s own admission, her son’s children didn’t even know their father since he’s always chosen crime over them. Now, because of him, a little girl won’t get to know her dad either, since he’s in prison for protecting her.
Not everyone sees it the same as Slater’s family and the law that’s earned him a criminal charge. A petition has been started to free Batterham from murder charges, since he was just doing what any good parent would have. Someone wasn’t going to make it out of that bedroom unharmed, and this dad didn’t allow that to be his daughter.
Only in a place like Australia, that abhors gun rights and bans people from owning them, would a victim be made the criminal for acting on his human right to protection. Slater’s family shouldn’t be given a soap box to stand on and profess their sob story about their son either. His children are also victims because of their own father, and their grandmother is partly to blame, not Batterham.
