“When we knocked on his front door after receiving the tip, he looked my deputies and detectives in the eye and said, ‘I know why you’re here. I want a lawyer.’” That is how Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd described the arrest of David Hicks, 62, at his home in Lakeland.
Deputies say Hicks followed a mother and her 5-year-old daughter around a Walmart in Mulberry on Monday, July 6, and exposed himself in the store. He is charged with indecent exposure, lewd exhibition and exposure of sexual organs.
How a video led to a name
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office said the mother did not see what happened until a store employee told her and alerted a supervisor. Surveillance footage showed the man tracking the family through the store. Judd praised the employee, saying “a great Walmart employee saw this and immediately took action.”
Two days later the office posted a Crime Stoppers video on social media asking the public to identify the man. On July 9 an anonymous tip arrived: “The suspect is David Hicks who did the same thing in Toccoa, Georgia.” Detectives compared Hicks’s photo with the footage and said he looked like the man in the video. They took him into custody around 1 p.m. Thursday. Since then, the sheriff’s office said, he has declined to talk to detectives.
Judd’s account at a press conference was blunt. “This is a sick guy and he’s dangerous,” he said.
A record across several states
Judd laid out a history of earlier arrests, according to FOX 13 Tampa Bay:
In 1991, Hicks was arrested in South Carolina for indecent exposure and paid a fine. A 1992 arrest in Georgia has no recorded outcome. In 1996 he was sentenced to three months in jail in Escambia County for indecent exposure. Two years later he was charged in Georgia with two counts of child molestation; adjudication was withheld and he received five years of probation.
Officials told FOX 13 they have not confirmed the outcomes of all those older cases beyond the sentences investigators described.
His brother is also in jail
Deputies learned during the arrest that Hicks is the younger brother of Thomas Hicks, 68, a Central Florida professional Santa Claus arrested in April in an operation by the sheriff’s office. Thomas Hicks remains in the Polk County Jail on several charges. “You’re talking about a family affair,” Judd said. “Both of these people are child sexual deviants.”
Judd said that since the information went public, deputies have been looking into at least one other incident involving David Hicks. Anyone who believes they were a victim, or who saw him exposing himself, can call the sheriff’s office at 863-298-6200.
Sources
- Brother of 'deviant' Lakeland Santa accused of exposing himself to child at Walmart | FOX 13 Tampa Bay
- Man arrested after exposing himself to a 5-year-old in a Mulberry Walmart, deputies say
