A Wildwood man has been arrested in the alleged sexual assault of an 8-year-old child.
James William Mellor, 59, was booked Tuesday at the Sumter County Detention Center on charges of sexual assault of a victim under the age of 12 and lewd and lascivious behavior. Both charges are felonies and he was being held without bond.
Mellow was picked up Tuesday and taken to the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office at Pinellas Plaza in The Villages were he was interviewed by deputies. The arrest report was heavily redacted due to the sensitive nature of the case.
In 2019, Mellor was arrested after The Villages Charter School staff alerted social services that a student had reported her mother had been threatened by Mellor with a gun over the holidays. The case was later dropped when the prosecutor’s office determined that the victim, who was Mellor’s ex-wife, possibly “coached and influenced the juvenile victim,” according to an announcement of no information from the state attorney’s office.
