Petition: Luna Survived. Two Other Kittens Didn’t. They Were Killed to Punish Someone Else.

Luna is a two-month-old kitten. She was taken to an animal hospital in Lee County, Florida, in August 2026, and she is expected to recover. Two other kittens from the same household did not survive. David Charette Jr. of Pine Manor has been arrested and charged with aggravated animal cruelty. According to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, the kittens were killed as a means of punishing a member of his own family. Sheriff Carmine Marceno said that element is what makes the case particularly disturbing. Please sign the petition asking prosecutors to pursue every count the evidence supports.

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What lifts this above a single cruelty charge is the pattern it belongs to. Killing or hurting a family pet in order to punish, frighten or control another person in the household is a recognised feature of coercive control, documented well enough that many domestic violence shelters now accept animals precisely because victims delay leaving when they cannot take a pet with them. The animal is harmed, and the harm is aimed at someone else. That is why cruelty statutes matter beyond the animal in front of you, and why prosecutors treating a case like this as a minor property matter get the seriousness wrong twice over.

Body camera footage released by the sheriff’s office shows Charette defending his treatment of Luna to deputies, describing her as in perfectly healthy condition and explaining that he had to bathe her because she soiled herself in the cage, and that she cried when he did. He has been charged and not convicted, and is entitled to due process. Florida’s aggravated animal cruelty statute is a third-degree felony, which gives a court real room if the evidence holds up, and the specific ask here is that every count is charged rather than folded into one. If any of this is close to home, animal abuse and abuse of people in the same household frequently travel together, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available on 1-800-799-7233. One Green Planet has examined why animal abuse deserves to be treated as a violent crime, and the arrest is reported by CBS12.

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