He shot his dogs to save boarding money for his vacation.....
COLUMBUS, Ohio - A judge has given a 90-day jail sentence to a man accused of killing his dogs to avoid boarding them while he went on vacation.
Forty-three-year-old David Santuomo pleaded guilty Wednesday to two counts of animal cruelty and one count of possession of a criminal tool — a homemade silencer he used on the end of a rifle, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Heather Robinson says Santuomo, a firefighter, shot his two mixed-breed dogs Sloopy and Skeeter on Dec. 3 after tying them to a pipe in his basement. She says he dumped the remains in a trash bin behind his firehouse.
Prosecutors say he bragged about the killings to colleagues.
Defense attorney Sam Shamansky says it was "totally out of character" for his client.
Comments
Some people are just douchebags and have no soul.
90 days? Animal cruelty laws simply are not strict enough. Humane societies have been endlessly trying to make these laws sting, but to no avail.
Sometimes I think that animals don't stand a chance.
still, it is nice to see the beginnings of an awareness by the courts that these are criminal matters.
and I 2nd sweetm: what a heartless asshole. may the memory of his crimes haunt him forever.
threadjack
sweet misery! how nice to see you round these parts
/threadjack
According to witnesses, he gave the finger to the media covering his case.
And there have been the usual arguments, "Oh, it's not as if he killed a child", "Let's get our priorities straight".
Sometimes I hate people.
Surrenderers at the shelters used to say, "we're giving up our cat because we're moving to Florida and we don't want to take him with us". I used to ask coworkers what was wrong with all these people, one told me that most of the people who did this had a type of borderline personality disorder - totally narcissistic. You could just see it - they would shit all over anyone who stood in the way of their selfish needs.
It sounds drastic to shoot a dog, but in my opinion, having worked in the field, there are dozens of people around out there who are a paper thin margin away from doing the same thing. Total self-centered entitlement. It's spreading.
I hope some dog loving gang mofos find out what he did while he's in da clink.
... take it out on animals.
Babysitters are pricy too.
The response from the general community - "Oh, don't overreact, they're just dogs" is what discourages me the most. Ellie's right, it's frighteningly common. I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a group of pet owners who claim to love their dogs but won't get pet insurance and then write off their pets as soon as vet bills become a possibility. "I've got my car payment/salon bills/kids' piano lessons to think about! It's just a dog!"
Scratch the surface and you find a raging sense of entitlement. Dominion over the earth and all that.
And at the first signs of trouble mom and dad are going to a home. I hope he enjoys his 3month stay in Club Gang Rape.
Yeah, nobody wants anybody to interfere with their fun.
Raging sense of entitlement is right, IG. It must be diagnoseable somehow. I went through exactly what Lauri is going through. After a while I couldn't trust anyone. (ps Lauri you probably know this already but we found that getting a reference from a vet was a good safeguard - we also asked for a history of the animals they've owned and "where are they now" - that helped weed out the psychos somewhat).
One guy adopted a 6 month old cat from us - he seemed so.....normal. Well 2 weeks later he walks in with a cardboard box - he was returning the cat like so many other adopters did. He didn't actually adopt the cat for himself, but he didn't think he had to mention this on the application (even though we clearly state that they do). He had adopted it for his college-bound daughter who did not expect to get the cat so soon - well with her busy schedule she just didn't have the time to feed the cat - priorities and all, you know.
I looked in the box and the cat was almost starved to death. Could see his ribs, etc. Very sick. I think we ultimately put him to sleep. The jerk got away with it. Don't ask me why, we had a cruelty office right upstairs, but I think the philosophy at the time was that if we got the reputation for arresting people returning animals, people would just toss them into traffic instead of returning them to us.
Unbeleiveably when I had originally adopted the cat to the guy, I had walked away thinking, "what a lucky cat - that guy is really nice". What did I know - I guess not much.