Governor Ron DeSantis better sit up and pay attention to what’s happening in his state. Investigative journalist Tom Lemons had a career as a small-town newsman covering police activity, politics, and county business until one day, he dug into a scandal no one wanted him to find.
Lemons began investigating reports that the Dawn Center, a domestic violence shelter in Hernando County, wasn’t what it was purported to be. Lemons interviewed former employees and women who sought shelter there who told a much different story of a government-funded flophouse with no rules and blatant theft of donations.
“The house was disgusting, filthy, gross…it’s a horrible place,” said one resident. “There were girls outside smoking pot, shooting dope in their cars,” recalled another. Residents also reported witnessing child abuse that went unreported. “Some of the women there would pull their three-year-old kid’s hair straight up and the staff wouldn’t say anything.” Former employees said they saw women drugging their children with bottles of melatonin so they could go out and party. Fathers reported that their ex-wives would kidnap their children in custody disputes and hide them inside the Dawn Center and the sheriff refused to go in and get them.
Lemons found that the Hernando County Sheriff’s office responded to huge numbers of calls to the Dawn Center, which wasn’t consistent with the rate from other shelters in the area. The Dawn Center receives huge amounts of federal money for victims of domestic violence through the Victims of Crime Act. But the women who have lived there say that the funding didn’t go to help them.