150 rats, 20 snakes, 2 lizards, dog, cat seized
Murrieta, CA (US)

Incident Date: Saturday, Dec 31, 2005
County: Riverside

Disposition: Alleged

Alleged: Christina Chen

More than 150 rats. Twenty snakes. Two large lizards. A dog. A cat. That's what authorities discovered Monday evening when they entered an apartment in the M building at Cal Oaks Apartments on Jackson Avenue. A good majority of the animals were alive. Some of them were not. All of them were found in filthy, fetid conditions in the one-bedroom apartment. After weeks of complaints by neighbors about the foul smell coming from the unit, Murrieta police officers entered the apartment with thoughts that they might end up finding a dead body. What they found was a different kind of gruesome scene.

Six of the snakes, which ranged in length from a foot to 6 feet, were dead and had been decomposing for more than a week. Though most of the rats were caged, about 30 of them were not. The cat was in a cage. The dog, a miniature dachshund, was loose. Feces and garbage were spread everywhere throughout the apartment. The stench reached as far as four doors down from the bottom-level unit and two floors up.

As animal control officers removed the animals from the apartment ---- cage by cage, tank by tank ---- Christina Chen, who was born in 1977, was arrested on suspicion of felony animal cruelty, said Murrieta police Sgt. Julie Hoxmeier.

Carissa Carmichael, 23, lives above the apartment and said that she first detected the smell about three weeks ago. Over time, it got worse and worse, she said. On January 16, 2006, Carmichael was furious and disgusted with what the authorities found. "I feel bad for the animals in the cages," she said. "I think it's totally disgusting that they would let them live like that." Carmichael said that, every now and then, she would see Chen and an older woman entering the apartment. She never saw them carrying animals or pet supplies, she said, and did not suspect that they were doing anything wrong.

The older woman identified herself only as Charlotte outside the apartment and said that the animals belonged to her son, whom she would not name. She said Chen was his girlfriend ---- they had met over the Internet ---- and he kept the animals in the apartment as his pets. Whereas Chen was not good at keeping the animals, Charlotte said, her son was. But he has been away for a month, she added. "He would give them salads and change their newspapers," she said. "He was really good to them."

According to Monqunec Middleton, an animal control officer with Animal Friends of the Valleys, it isn't all that rare that authorities find "collectors" or "hoarders" in Southwest County. This was the second time in three months that a large number of animals were found to be living in unfit conditions, Middleton said. "They think they're doing good," she said. "But they don't know how bad it is. Usually, things like this are not found until there is an odor. Collecters are very private."

Some of the animals taken from Chen's apartment ---- those deemed adoptable ---- will be spared, Middleton said. The rats, on the other hand, will likely be euthanized because they are probably carrying diseases, she said.

References

• « CA State Animal Cruelty Map

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