North Carolina man charged for performing circumcisions on his children with a utility knife

**Terminator** · 02-09-08, 01:40 PM

A North Carolina man faces charges that he used a utility knife to circumcise two of his 11 children, police say.
Investigators tell the Charlotte Observer that Johnny Marlowe's wife and another women gave birth to boys in 2005 and 2006. “He took it upon himself to circumcise both of those kids,” Caldwell County Sheriff’s Detective Shelly Hartley tells the Gaston Gazette. “I do have reports that one was injured and bled extensively. He would not allow the women to take the baby to the doctor. In the reports I have he used his utility knife to do it.”
The paper says Marlowe told a reporter he follows a "polygamist lifestyle" and has performed circumcisions on three of his sons. “Everybody has their own opinion,” Marlowe is quoted as saying during a jailhouse interview in November. “If I felt I was doing something wrong to my children, I wouldn’t do it.”
But WBTV-TV reports the 32-year-old is serving time in the Gaston County Jail for assaulting his wife and neglecting his children. When he's released, the detective says she will serve him with felony warrants related to two of the homemade circumcisions.
"I have never seen anything like this before," Hartley tells the Observer. "Everyone I work with, we were talking this morning -- they say, 'I think about this case every day.' And I'm the mother of two boys, so I think about it every day, too."