MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – A 12-year-old girl removed from her southwest Miami-Dade home, along with her siblings, had scars old and new covering her body, according to police. Authorities said she suffered a lifetime of abuse at the hands of her mother.
According to the Miami-Dade Police Department, the investigation into Yolanda Welch began after the Florida Department of Children and Families removed the children from her custody in March.
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The girl told DCF investigators about “multiple abuse scenarios” and had “multiple scars throughout her body,” an arrest report states.
The report states the girl told an MDPD detective through tears that “she did not feel safe returning to her mother because she had been abused her entire life.”
She told the detective that Welch “hits her often with a white extension cord” and “was observed with old scars and more recent markings that were in the healing stages,” police said.
Authorities went to Welch’s home in the Naranja area Tuesday evening to arrest her, the report states. Police said the 37-year-old declined to give a statement.
Welch was taken to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center and a judge found probable cause to charge her with aggravated child abuse causing great bodily harm.
She was being held on a $5,000 bond and a probation violation as of Wednesday afternoon.
According to court records, Welch has a history of arrests in Miami-Dade County for violent and nonviolent crimes. Many of the cases, including a 2010 case where she faced three child abuse charges, were later dropped.