FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The debate over school masks boiled over Wednesday morning when a mask opponent was arrested for shoving a masked high school student in Fort Lauderdale and twisting her arm.
Dan Bauman, 50 — a Fort Lauderdale man with a history of confrontations over masks — was charged with aggravated child abuse, according to the Fort Lauderdale Police Department.
He had been trying to video record the student at Fort Lauderdale High School. The student responded “I’ve had enough for four days” and tried to grab Bauman’s phone, according to a police report.
Bauman then pushed the student’s shoulder and grabbed her hand, twisting her arm, the report said. A police officer and a security guard grabbed Bauman and placed him under arrest. He was taken to the Broward County Jail.
The school resource officer said he knew Bauman from previous protests over the school district’s mask policy, Officer Paul Johnson wrote in his report.
Bauman has a history of other run-ins with the law, often involving COVID masks. He has received trespass warnings at least five times in the past year and half for flouting mask rules, police records show.
In 2018, the owner of a Fort Lauderdale dance studio filed a protection order against Bauman for stalking, court records show. The owner told police that Bauman had threatened him, his wife and their kids.
In August 2020, police were called to a Home Depot in Fort Lauderdale over reports of an aggressive customer wearing pink thong underwear on his face as a mask. Security guards told him he needed to wear a proper mask and offered him one, but he declined, saying he could wear what he wanted, according to a police report.
He left but returned to argue with security guards while recording video on his phone.
The next month, he went to the Fort Lauderdale police station twice in two weeks and was refused entry for refusing to wear a mask. He once went to his car and returned wearing pink underwear on his face. An officer said that was fine, but he needed to take Bauman’s temperature. He refused and left, police said.
Bauman was warned about trespassing at a Publix grocery store in Fort Lauderdale a month after that when he tried to enter without a mask.
Bauman said he had medical issues that prevented him from wearing a mask. He claimed Publix employees grabbed him, but security footage from inside the store showed that no employee ever touched him.
Managers at a post office and UPS store said he came into their locations multiple times, causing disturbances while either maskless or wearing underwear on his head, according to police reports.
In December of 2020, Bauman was maskless in a pharmacy when two younger women asked him to put a mask on for everyone’s safety. He became defensive and argumentative, called one of them a monkey and punched one of them in the face, according to a police report.
The two women responded by hitting him and throwing a chair at him.
