Mistrial in case of infant left outside of Myrtle Beach strip club

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Written by: 195 on Jan 28, 2010

A mistrial was declared Wednesday after a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict concerning a Myrtle Beach man accused of leaving his 10-month-old daughter in an unlocked car outside a strip club in 2008.

Geoffrey Allen Hale, 28, faced a charge of unlawful conduct toward a child. Police said that on Oct. 15, 2008, an officer found Hale receiving a lap dance around 11:45 p.m. inside Derriere's Gentleman's Club while the child was in the car outside.

Jurors deliberated for nearly three hours before they deadlocked. The case will be tried again, but a new date was not clear Wednesday.

After the trial defense attorney Trent Chambers said he expects the case to be called again soon.

"We would've liked to have resolved it today," Chambers said. "We certainly hope justice will be served in the future."

Hale testified Wednesday that on Oct. 15, 2008, he had problems with his wireless Internet connection at home while finishing online classes for the University of Phoenix. He said he went to the strip club, where his wife was a dancer, to get the couple's only cell phone and report the issue to school officials. When he arrived at the club, Hale said he left his sleeping daughter, Addison, in the vehicle and went inside. The club manager told his wife to dance for a song before retrieving the phone for her husband, he said.

So, Hale testified, he waited.

"I made a decision. At the time I thought it was the right decision. It was an honest mistake. I made a quick decision that obviously lead to be a mistake," said Hale, who testified he left the car on, but not running to provide air flow and radio to his daughter, who was buckled into her car seat in the back. "I thought that I would be in and out. Before the door even shut behind me, I thought I could be pushing it back out."

But an anonymous call to police led to Hale's charges.

According to surveillance video, Hale was inside the club for 11 to 12 minutes before Officer Joseph West, who arrived a minute after the 911 call, approached him, police testified.

West said he saw a man smoking a cigarette and seated at a table and surrounded by two to three girls, so he assumed he was getting a lap dance.

But Hale and his wife, Kara Hale, disputed that he was receiving a lap dance.

Police and Kara Hale testified that Geoffrey Hale did not tell anyone his daughter was in the vehicle when he entered the club.

Kara Hale said she did not get to speak to her husband because her manager told her to go on stage, and he was being escorted out of the club by a police officer before the song ended, she testified.

"My world was falling apart. I was upset," Kara Hale testified how she felt when she went outside to see what was going on with her husband that night.

"How was Addison?" defense attorney Trent Chambers asked.

"She was sleeping. She was safe." Kara Hale testified.

Soon after his arrest, the couple returned to the Bristol, Tenn., area, which is where they grew up, because of intense media scrutiny, Kara Hale testified. She testified she had taken the job at the club, which was her second job, weeks earlier because her husband had been laid off from his hurricane and security window film installation job.

Chambers told jurors other people in similar crimes were not charged with felonies and the location of the incident was the reason Hale faces the felony charge.

But Assistant Solicitor Candice Lively said police and prosecutors were following state law.

"We don't put our children in that environment ever. We just don't do that," Lively said. "Sometimes people have to be arrested and brought before a court to understand they have committed a crime and that is how the system works."

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