Pet-Abuse.Com - Animal Abuse Case Details: Dog fatally shot

Dog fatally shot
Brooksville, FL (US)

Incident Date: Thursday, Mar 31, 2005
County: Hernando
Local Map: available
Disposition: Convicted

Abuser/Suspect: Stuart Douglas Harvey

Case Updates: 2 update(s) available

Case ID: 6378

Classification: Shooting

Animal: dog (non pit-bull)

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Animal was offleash or loose

Child or elder neglect

Stuart Douglas Harvey allegedly stood on his porch with a .22-caliber rifle and shot a small black dog as it was running toward the boys who owned it who had just gotten off the school bus.

Harvey, 50, of Brooksville, was arrested in April 2005, charged with cruelty to animals, has a pretrial hearing the morning of December 1, 2005, and a trial scheduled for December 5, 2005 - assuming no plea deal is reached.

Assistant State Attorney Rob Lewis is prosecuting the case.

Case Updates

The hot-button dog-shooting case of Stuart Harvey came to an anticlimactic end Thursday morning in the courtroom of Circuit Judge Jack Springstead.

On April 19, 2005, Harvey killed his neighbor Susan Cadle's small black Lab named Spot because, he and his neighbors said, it was being allowed to run wild and had become a nuisance and also frightening.

On Thursday, he pleaded no contest to criminal mischief and the charge of reckless discharge of a firearm, both misdemeanors - an overall resolution that was a drop from the original count of felony animal cruelty.

He was sentenced to one year of probation, and Springstead also ordered him to take a gun safety course, write a letter of apology to the Cadles and pay them back the $300 vet bill.

"In no way, shape or form is the state taking the position that it's justifying the shooting of an animal," Assistant State Attorney Rob Lewis said in court.

"This is a situation that never should've seen the light of court," Harvey said outside the courtroom after the plea bargain was announced.

Harvey, 50, is a roofer.

Cadle, 60, has five sons, lives on Social Security and is taking classes at Pasco-Hernando Community College to become a paralegal. She said earlier this week that she hadn't built a fence to keep her dogs in because she couldn't afford it. So Harvey stood on his porch one afternoon last spring and used a .22-caliber rifle to shoot the dog in the neck. One of Cadle's sons and two of her grandsons had gotten off the school bus and were walking down the road when the dog hit the ground.

The family took the dog to the vet to have him put down.

Harvey was arrested later in the afternoon and charged with felony animal cruelty.

Lewis said Thursday the Cadles were okay with the terms of Harvey's deal.

"They were good with that," he said by phone from his office. "As long as the guy wasn't getting away scot-free, and as long as he paid some penalty, they were fine with that."

Cadle didn't return a message left Thursday at her home.

Harvey had a handful of neighbors and friends with him on Thursday to support him in court.

"We have had nothing but problems with their dogs," David Wentworth said.

"I'm an animal lover - I wouldn't watch King Kong - and I've never been bitten by a dog, but I don't want to be," Cheryl Dorvee said.

"I think it was a very good disposition, and I think it was fair to the state and to Mr. Harvey," said Jimmy Brown, Harvey's attorney.

Harvey has never denied shooting the dog. That didn't change Thursday. "I regret the fact that the dog was shot in front of those kids," he said outside the courtroom. "I do regret that."

Source: St. Petersburg Times - April 28, 2006
Update posted on Apr 28, 2006 - 2:17PM

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Stuart Harvey killed a dog. He shot it dead and has never said he didn't.

Is he necessarily guilty of animal cruelty?

That question is set to be answered either today at a final pretrial hearing or in a trial scheduled for next week.

Two takes here:

Harvey killed his neighbor Susan Cadle's small black Lab named Spot. He should be punished.

Harvey did the rest of his neighbors a favor by doing what he did. He should be thanked.

The State Attorney's Office is expected to offer him a plea deal this morning in the courtroom of Circuit Judge Jack Springstead. The felony charge of animal cruelty likely would be reduced to criminal mischief, reckless display of a firearm or a misdemeanor cruelty charge, both prosecutor Rob Lewis and defense attorney Jimmy Brown said Wednesday. Harvey probably would get some form of probation instead of any jail time.

This story started as a simple case of animal cruelty: Man shoots dog. But what it has become over the course of depositions is a small slice of a study on how things have changed over the last 15 to 20 years in Hernando County.

"I think this is the longstanding civic tradition of the abatement of a public nuisance," Brown said. "People have become far too dependent on the government. We have become much less independent and much more dependent on somebody else taking care of our problems for us. What Mr. Harvey did was tantamount to the abatement of a public nuisance.

"He should be congratulated, not prosecuted - that's the general feeling in the neighborhood."

Cadle said this week that the dog was not vicious.

"He was just a Lab puppy," she said.

Harvey said the dog was "a menace."

"The dog should have been under control and never had been," he said. "I didn't just shoot a dog because I felt like shooting a dog."

Spoto Lane, where Harvey and Cadle both have lived for about a decade, is a dusty, loose-dirt back road west of Brooksville with lots of signs saying NO TRESPASSING and BEWARE OF DOG. Cadle and her family live in a trailer at the end of the road. Harvey lives a few trailers up.

Harvey, 50, is a roofer.

Cadle, 60, has five sons and is going to paralegal school at Pasco-Hernando Community College. Her oldest son used to hunt with Harvey, and so did her late husband, a construction worker who died about two years ago and went by the nickname of "Bullet." Cadle said Wednesday she couldn't build a fence to keep her dogs in because she couldn't afford it.

"I know my dogs were a pain in the butt," she said. "But I live on Social Security.

"I don't bother nobody. I stay to myself, I go to school, I tend to my children. That's why I bought this place 11 years ago out here in the bushes."

But a year ago Wednesday, Harvey stood on his porch across the way and used a .22-caliber rifle to put a bullet in the neck of the dog. Cadle's youngest son, who was 14 at the time, two of her teenage grandsons and another boy from the neighborhood had just gotten off the school bus, according to the arrest report from the Sheriff's Office. The dog was running to greet them.

There was a loud, single pop, and the dog went down. Harvey began cursing at the boys.

The bullet severed the dog's spinal cord. The family took him to the vet to have him put down.

Harvey was arrested later in the afternoon and charged with felony animal cruelty. He posted $2,000 bail.

Since then, though, other neighbors from Spoto Lane have filled Harvey's court file with statements saying the dog that he killed and several others that belonged to Cadle ran loose and "terrorized" the neighborhood. They called the dogs mean and nasty and said they always growled, barked and showed their teeth, tipped over and tore up trash cans, chased cars, bikes and four-wheelers and even killed some chickens.

One woman said her son at times had to use a bullwhip to scare off the dogs so they had time to make a run for their front door.

None of this, said Lewis, the prosecutor, makes what Harvey did okay.

"If you find a dog to be a pain in the a--, you don't get to shoot it," he said. "That's not the way you handle these things."

Actually, Brown said, that might be exactly how it should be handled, and how these sorts of situations used to be dealt with around here. Neighborhood feuds stayed in the neighborhood. Most of the time the law didn't need to be called to reach a resolution.

Brown started in the State Attorney's Office in Brooksville as a prosecutor in 1976. Back then, of course, Hernando was much less populated and much more rural, and not really a part of the Tampa Bay metropolitan area like it is now, especially in and around Brooksville and on the eastern side of the county. Brown said he wouldn't have filed these charges at that time - and even in 1985, when he opened his private practice, he would have been shocked to have a potential client come to him with this scenario.

"People used to take more direct responsibility for themselves, their families and their neighbors," he said. "Problems were handled within the family, within the neighborhood and a lot of times within the church.

"We've gotten to the point where the almost default setting is to pick up the phone and call 911."

Cadle still thinks Harvey should go to prison.

"My biggest concern is that he could have shot one of the kids," she said. "If he had shot my child, my son, you'd be coming to visit me in county. Because I would have shot him."

"I've never denied that I shot the dog," Harvey said. "But I believe there should be mitigating circumstances and that they should be taken into account. Ordinarily, I'd tell you that it is wrong, but in this case it's just not that cut and dried."

Three or four nights after he shot Spot, Harvey said late last month in a sworn statement made to his attorney and put in his court file, he was sitting by a campfire in his yard when one of Cadle's sons came up to him, asked him if he wanted to drink a few beers, made some small talk and then said he was supposed to relay word that they were ready to drop the charges if Harvey paid the $300 vet bill and another $500 on top of that.

"My reply was basically that he could take a hike," Harvey wrote in his statement, "that I wasn't paying anything for shooting a menace."

Source: St. Petersburg Times - April 20, 2006
Update posted on Apr 21, 2006 - 11:34AM

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References

	St Petersburg Times - December 1, 2005
	St Petersburg Times - April 20, 2006

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Dog fatally shotBrooksville, FL (US)

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Dog fatally shot
Brooksville, FL (US)