Roswell Police Sergeant Demoted After ‘Freezing Out’ a Child

January 2, 2018

Roswell Police Sergeant Daniel Elzey Demoted After Bodycam Shows Handcuffed 13-Year-Old Left in Freezing Patrol Car.

Roswell Police Sergeant Daniel Elzey became the focus of national outrage after body-camera footage showed him using the cold as leverage against a handcuffed 13-year-old boy who had been detained in the back of a patrol car.

The incident happened during the early morning hours of January 2, 2018, after Roswell officers encountered the teenager driving a golf cart on Alpharetta Highway. According to reporting from ABC News, the boy’s clothing was wet and frozen, and he gave officers conflicting answers about where he lived, where his mother was, and how he got the golf cart.

Instead of simply keeping the child warm while officers worked to contact a parent or guardian, body-camera video showed Elzey deciding to make the cold part of the questioning. He rolled down the windows of the patrol car, moved another officer into his heated vehicle, and left the handcuffed teenager sitting in the cold.

At one point, Elzey was heard telling another officer: “Let him get a little chilly. Maybe that’ll help.”

The video showed the teenager crying, saying he did not want to go to jail, and complaining that he could not feel his wrists. According to The Macon Telegraph, Elzey later returned to the car and taunted the boy about the cold, telling him he had heat in his own vehicle.

What made the incident even more disturbing was the gap between what the video showed and what was written down. Reports from ABC News and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said the police report did not mention that officers intentionally used the cold as a pressure tactic.

The teenager was eventually released to his mother without charges. Elzey, however, was not immediately removed from duty. According to ABC News, he was placed on paid administrative leave on July 19, 2018, more than six months after the incident occurred.

The story became part of a broader scandal involving the Roswell Police Department. Around the same period, the department was already under scrutiny over other misconduct cases, including officers using a coin-flip app during an arrest decision and a police dog that reportedly continued biting a compliant teenager despite repeated commands to release.

According to 11Alive, Elzey had even been named the department’s “Supervisor of the Year” after the freezing-car incident but before the body-camera footage became public.

After an internal investigation, Roswell Police Chief Rusty Grant confirmed that Elzey would be stripped of his sergeant rank. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Elzey was demoted to Police Officer II and suspended for 30 days without pay.

The punishment fell far short of what many people expected after watching a police supervisor leave a wet, handcuffed child in a freezing patrol car as an interrogation tactic. For critics, the case was not just about one officer’s judgment. It was about a police culture where misconduct was allegedly minimized, omitted from paperwork, and only seriously addressed after reporters obtained and exposed the video.

Elzey does not appear to have been criminally charged in connection with the incident based on available public reporting. That fact makes the case another example of the difference between internal discipline and real accountability. A civilian who locked a wet child in a freezing car to force answers would likely face a very different response.

The Daniel Elzey case remains a reminder of why body cameras, open records requests, and aggressive local journalism matter. Without the video, the public may have never known that a Roswell police supervisor used cold weather against a detained child while sitting nearby in a heated patrol car.

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