Man charged with attempting to break into Salisbury church

Published 11:12 am Thursday, February 7, 2019

SALISBURY — A South Carolina man is charged with attempting to break into a Salisbury church with his 2-year-old son in tow.

The Rowan County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday charged Joshua Matthew Wilson, 29, of the 900 block of E Street, Hartsville, South Carolina, with misdemeanor child abuse and attempted breaking and entering.

About 2:45 p.m. Tuesday, someone reported seeing a man who was bloody with a young child at Organ Lutheran Church, 1515 Organ Church Road.

Rowan authorities met with the man, later identified as Joshua Wilson, who had a cut on his arm.

Wilson told a deputy that he left his house about 2 a.m. and had been at an unknown address on Wind Swept Way with his son when they got locked out. He said they walked along Old Beatty Ford Road and stopped at the church to rest.

According to Wilson, he leaned against a window and it broke, and he cut his arm. He could not tell the deputy what direction he was headed or details about what he’d been doing for the previous 12 hours, a report said.

He was taken by ambulance to Novant Health Rowan Medical Center. In the ambulance, a medic who was using saline to clean his wounds said the child snatched it and began drinking it. Medics thought the child was thirsty and gave him a bottle of water.

The broken window pane was in the church’s historic sanctuary. According to the pastor, nothing else was damaged or taken.

The hospital contacted the deputy to tell him Wilson was being discharged, but when the deputy arrived he learned Wilson had already been released. He was later spotted walking along Irish Potato Road in Concord, which is close to the Rowan County line.

The deputy went to where Wilson was last seen, along with a Cabarrus County Sheriff’s Office K-9 unit and its drone division. The officers found Wilson, who ran into a nearby wooded area. He was arrested when he came out of the woods about an hour later.

He remains in the Rowan County Detention Center under a $5,000 secured bond.

The child was initially placed in the care of Wilson’s father when the Rowan County Department of Social Services could not find the child’s mother.