12/11/2025
My daughter screamed "That's My Grandpa" while police pinned biker down saying he looked criminal.
My daughter watched her grandfather get slammed to the ground in front of hundreds of people because someone decided a man in a leather vest couldn't possibly be related to a little girl in a pink fairy dress.
My name is Rebecca and that man on the ground is my father. He's sixty-seven years old, a retired ironworker, a Vietnam veteran, and the best grandfather my daughter could ever ask for.
But to the woman who called 911, he was just a "dirty old biker" who "obviously didn't belong with that child."
I wasn't there when it happened. I was at home recovering from surgery. My dad had offered to take my daughter Lily to the county fair because I couldn't walk more than a few steps without pain.
He'd been so excited. Bought her that fairy dress himself. Planned the whole day around what she wanted to do.
And someone destroyed it with one phone call.
The 911 recording was released later. I've listened to it a hundred times. "There's a suspicious man with a little girl at the fair. He looks homeless.
Dirty leather jacket. Long gray hair. The child is very well-dressed and he clearly doesn't belong with her. I think he might have taken her."
The dispatcher asked if the man was hurting the child. "No, but look at him. He's obviously not her father. He looks like a criminal."
That's all it took. Those words. That assumption. My father's appearance was enough to get two officers dispatched to investigate a potential kidnapping.
My dad didn't even see them coming. He was kneeling down, tying Lily's shoe. She'd gotten cotton candy on her fairy wings and he was trying to clean it off while she giggled. That's when they grabbed him.
They yanked him backward by his vest. Threw him to the ground. Lily started screaming.
My father, a man with two bad knees and a metal plate in his spine from a construction accident, was face-down on the asphalt with two officers pinning him down.
"That's my grandpa!" Lily screamed. "Stop hurting my grandpa!"
She tried to grab the officer's arm. Tried to pull him off. A five-year-old girl in a pink fairy dress fighting police officers to save her grandfather. That's when my father pulled out his........ (continue reading in the C0MMENT)