Louisiana Voice

If there’s anything to be learned by the Jackson and Calcasieu Parish sheriff’s departments, it’s you don’t piss off people by abducting or killing their pets.

In Calcasieu Parish, Justin and Christine Granger of Lake Charles have filed suit in federal court against the sheriff’s office, Sheriff Gary “Stitch” Guillory and Deputy Jordan Trahan after Trahan entered the Granger’s property on an unrelated call and ended up shooting and killing the family dog.

While no litigation has yet been filed in Jackson Parish, the possibility looms over the department after Tommy McDougald’s two pet cats were trapped and hauled away by the Village of Hodge and while the action was not taken specifically by the sheriff’s department, the Hodge mayor is a former deputy sheriff and McDougald is having a bit of trouble in getting the sheriff’s department to cooperate in investigating his complaint.

Trahan was responding to a “traffic complaint” last Aug. 1 but when he came upon the scene, there was no traffic violation observed, says the lawsuit. So, he pulled onto the Granger driveway and exited his patrol car to “leave a card.”

“For reasons unknown to [the Grangers], Trahan discharged his department-issued firearm and shot [the Granger’s] family dog affectionately named tank, killing him in his own yard.”

The lawsuit says Trahan entered the Granger property without cause “as there was no visible traffic violations subject to the complaint called in.” The lawsuit does not identify the person who initially reported the traffic violation.

“It was not until Christine Granger returned home that morning with numerous Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office units surrounding her home that she was told by a second deputy of the tragedy involving her family pet,” the petition says.

The Grangers made a public records request for both cam footage but the lawsuit says it is believed that deputies deliberately “turned off their respective body cameras and/or their audio and on that same day, Aug. 4, they were informed by the sheriff’s department that release of personal information on deputies, including home addresses, was prohibited—information for which the Grangers say they never asked.

The lawsuit says the five-year-old Rottweiler had never shown hostility toward other people and even if he had, Trahan “could have employed non-lethal methods to restrain Tank rather than shooting and killing, but neither attempted nor exhausted such methods.”

It’s not that unusual to find macho cops gunning down dogs as tiny as chihuahuas for no reason other than sport. A quick GOOGLE SEARCH found incidents in Little Rock, San Antonio and other locations. It’s obviously a case of gig game-hunter envy.

Meanwhile, back in Hodge, some 200 miles or so to the north central part of the state, Mayor Gerald Palmer, a retired Jackson Parish deputy who McDougald says has “a history of Civil Rights violations,” finds himself on the hot seat because of the village’s non-response to McDougald’s inquiries about his cats. The conflict between the sheriff’s office and the Hodge village attorney hasn’t helped assuage the feelings of McDougald.

He says when his wife left for work on April 8, she observed a town worker bating a life trap at the corner of their neighbor’s carport and when he and his wife returned home from work, their two pet cats were missing. It turns out, his neighbor told him, Mayor Palmer had requested permission to set the traps, baited with sardines only six feet from the McDougald property line, in order to catch “feral cats.”

When McDougald began trying to find his cats, he was told, “They were caught,” and Palmer told him, “We hauled them far off. You should have kept your pets in your yard.” (of course, when you bait a trap with sardines, you’re going to attract every cat in the neighborhood). McDougald also learned that the village was in violation of its own 1993 ordinance that requires the village to maintain a complete registry of every animal impounded.

Sheriff’s department Chief Deputy Stephen Watts, in response to McDougald’s inquiry about that registry, replied, “…[W]e are in the process of determining whether the referenced records exist and, if so, the appropriate steps for obtaining and reviewing them.”

But village attorney wrote McDougald on April 23 to say the village the “has no animal control or hold logs and Jackson Parish has no animal control or shelter” and “[T]here are no public emails dealing with animal control other than your email and people emailing the village because of your publication on Facebook of what you believe is the situation.”

In other words, take a hike.

The sheriff’s department, meanwhile, has been less than enthusiastic in following up on his complaint, waiting a full 21 days to load his sworn complaint into a departmental file. McDougald, meanwhile, has taken his complaint to the Louisiana Attorney General and the Louisiana Legislative Auditor.

He obviously doesn’t intend to let this matter of cat abduction go.