An unnamed patient at Gulf Coast Hospital in Fort Myers, Florida, reportedly interrupted hospital worker Frantz Beldonin, 23, as he was sucking on her toes late Monday night. Beldonin was arrested early the next morning and faces one count of battery on a person age 65 or older. Beldonin protested that he would never do such a thing, insisting that the incident was just a huge misunderstanding.
“When the security came and got me, I was like ‘what’s going on?’ and they were like ‘just come with me,’” Beldonin told WBBH. “It makes me look crazy… or, like, creepy, and I’m not… I’m not that type of dude.”
Beldonin had been working as a “sitter” to keep track of a different patient in the same room. He said that the patient who accused him misinterpreted what was happening when he innocently brushed against her toe while trying to recover his dropped phone.
“I dropped my phone under the bed and as I’m trying to get my phone and she kicks,” Beldonin explained. “She’s afraid and we’re in the dark, it’s a dark room, with a dark male at the foot of her bed. I can understand.”
The victim offered a different version of events to police, according to a police report obtained by the channel.
“I felt my right foot being touched,” the patient told police in her statement. “I thought it was a nurse checking for swelling on my feet and ankles but sometime later I felt it again. The third time this happened it felt wet between my toes. I looked up and saw that there was a man on his knees and his head bent over my foot.”
The patient said Beldonin poked his head around a dividing curtain a short time after the incident and asked, “Are we ok?” The patient then told a nurse what had happened, before police became involved and later arrested Beldonin.
The alleged toe sucker’s mother came to her son’s defense in an interview with the news outlet. She suggested that racism against her son was responsible for the allegation, and that he would never “suck an old lady’s toes.”
“No, no, no… never. That’s not my son,” his mother told WBBH. “He would never do that, they just put him in jail and said he sucked the lady’s toes.”
Beldonin was released on a $1,500 bond one day after being arrested, but fears that the pending criminal charge could cause serious and lasting repercussions for him later in life.
“I know there’s other opportunities, but there won’t be if I get hit with this felony,” he told the outlet.
Newsweek reached out to the Lee County Sheriff’s Department for additional information but did not receive a response in time for publication.
A separate purported incident of unsolicited toe sucking by another Florida man was reported only months ago, when a man in Bradenton, Florida told police he had been awakened by a man who broke into his house and began sucking on his toes.
The toe-sucking home invader allegedly told the man he was there to “suck toes” when questioned by his startled victim.
