LEBANON — Steve Fletcher said he knew he was wrong when he threatened boys at a school bus stop with a dart gun Nov. 6. But he testified Monday that he believed he had to take action to stop them from bullying his 11-year-old son.

        “I was frustrated because I didn't think the school was protecting my son ...,” Mr. Fletcher told a Warren County jury. “It is my responsibility to take care of my kids.”

        The jurors decided Monday that his actions weren't criminal.

        After 45 minutes of deliberation, they acquitted the 42-year-old single dad of a charge of felonious assault, a charge that could have sent him to prison for eight years.

        Mr. Fletcher, who had spent four months in jail awaiting trial, exhaled slowly, but said nothing, after Judge Neal Bronson read the verdict aloud in his common pleas courtroom.

        While Mr. Fletcher was taken back to the Warren County Jail to be processed out, his lawyer said he will now fight to regain custody of his three sons, who have been living with their mother since Mr. Fletcher's arrest.

        “That was his whole goal,” Mr. Kircher said. “That was why he refused to plead to a felony — because he didn't want to lose his kids.”

        Prosecutors had to persuade jurors that Mr. Fletcher meant to harm the boys and that he had used a real gun, although police never found or looked for one. Mr. Fletcher maintained that he only wanted to scare the boys and used a dart gun, or air pistol, which he tossed in a trash bin later.

        “It was a stretch to believe he had a real gun. There was never a weapon introduced into evidence,” juror Harold Johnson of Mason said after the trial. “We came to the conclusion he really didn't intend any bodily harm. It was bullies against bullies. He may be (42) years old, but he's still a kid if he did something that stupid.”

        Twelve-year-old Allen Spahni told the jury that the gun that Mr. Fletcher aimed at his abdomen appeared to be real and that he thought it was a Beretta.

        He earlier had told authorities that it could have been a Glock or a Browning pistol.

        Mr. Fletcher testified that he took a dart gun to the bus stop on Franklin Road to scare the group of older boys into leaving Ian, then 11, alone.

        The bullying had become so bad that Ian was either being chased from the bus stop or avoiding it altogether and walking to school on a dangerous road, Mr. Fletcher said.

        He said school officials did little except to warn the boys to stop harassing his son.

        Allen and others at the bus stop that day admitted that Ian, who is 5-feet-9 and weighs 209 pounds, had become the brunt of teasing by boys.

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