FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A Canadian tourist is facing a felony charge in South Florida after police said he molested a 9-year-old boy at a hotel on Fort Lauderdale Beach.

According to court documents obtained by Local 10 News on Monday, the incident happened on Dec. 29 at the Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort Hotel & Suites at 4221 N. Ocean Blvd.

Fort Lauderdale police arrested Curtis Elliot Smith, 47, of Stony Plain, Alberta, early the next morning. They said several witnesses corroborated the young victim’s account of the incident.

According to an arrest report, the boy and witnesses told police that he was sitting next to his mother outside the hotel, working on a coloring book, when Smith ― a stranger ― “touched him on the chest and on his private areas in a sexual manner.”

The boy said he tried to tell his mother about what was happening, but she was “busy on her computer” and talking to someone, it states. Police said the boy moved himself to another table and Smith followed him and again touched him, eventually grabbing his genitals “really hard.”

According to the report, the boy told Smith to stop and Smith “became scared due to the people around him and walked to his hotel room.”

Police said one of the witnesses became “irate” and confronted Smith after the boy told the witness that he was a stranger. Smith, they said, “locked himself in his room.”

The witness additionally told officers he saw Smith and another man “approaching them and starting up a conversation with the mother” before the crime took place, police said.

Smith remained in the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s Paul Rein Detention Facility in Pompano Beach as of Monday morning, where he was being held without bond on a charge of lewd or lascivious molestation.

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