Petition: Troopers Found Five Dead Dogs in Marlborough. When They Came Back, the Bodies Were Gone.

Connecticut State Police went to a property on Saner Road in Marlborough in September looking into reports of drug activity and violence. While they were there, a man who had just been arrested on an unrelated warrant told them something they had not come for: there were dead dogs on the property, and he could show them where. He had been hired to feed the animals.

He took troopers to a basement, where one dog’s body lay. Then to an outbuilding, where at least four more were stacked beneath a carpet. Then to a patch of ground where another had been buried. Troopers also found two dogs still alive inside the house, with animal waste across the floors, and four more in a trailer with little food and no water. One of the dead dogs, according to the warrant affidavit, had been electrocuted after chewing exposed wiring.

Troopers left to obtain a search warrant. When they returned a couple of days later, the dead dogs were gone. The man who had shown them the bodies told investigators he had received a phone call: the property’s occupant had moved them off the site.

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Troy McDermott, 49, of Hartford was arrested on 17 September and charged with eleven counts of cruelty to animals and one count of tampering with physical evidence. His girlfriend, Crystal Bianco, was charged with one count of animal cruelty after troopers found her dog living in the same conditions and concluded she knew about them. Both have been charged, not convicted, and the case is before the courts.

That tampering charge is the one worth sitting with. Eleven cruelty counts describe what happened to the animals. The twelfth count describes what happened after somebody noticed, and it is the reason the full scale of this may never be established. The affidavit ties the charges to six living dogs and five dead ones. The informant told troopers that around twelve more had died on the property over the past year. Those deaths are an allegation rather than a finding, because the bodies that would have answered the question were removed.

Seven animals came out alive: four adult pit bulls and three puppies, seized under the search warrant and now in care. They are the ones this still turns on. Connecticut law allows courts to order that a person convicted of animal cruelty be prohibited from owning animals, and that is the specific thing this petition asks the state to pursue here rather than leave to discretion. A conviction that ends in a fine and a suspended sentence leaves nothing standing between this man and the next dog.

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Connecticut has one of the stronger animal cruelty statutes in the country on paper, including a programme that appoints volunteer advocates to speak for animals in court proceedings. Whether it does anything here depends on prosecutors asking for it. Our coverage of what animals need from the households that keep them is a long way from a case like this, and that distance is the point: almost every dog in America lives somewhere ordinary, and the ones who do not are found by accident, by somebody who was there for another reason entirely.

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