Trini Cat Killer To Serve Six Years In New York Jail

Posted on Thursday, 30 June 2011 by JJ Bailey

A TRINIDADIAN living in New York has been sentenced to six years in a New York State Prison for torturing and killing a pet cat. The judge who sentenced him said he may be deported back to Trinidad and Tobago after completing his jail term. According to a New York Daily News story in May this year, on the morning of May 25 the accused, Angelo Monderoy, 20, was sentenced to six years in jail by a Brooklyn judge for killing the tabby cat named Tommy Two Times. The cat belonged to the supervisor of the apartment building where he lived. Monderoy, who was charged along with another man for the crime, later told a friend he did it out of boredom.

"To torture and kill an animal because you were bored?" Justice Michael Gary asked in bitter bewilderment after a jury delivered the guilty verdict, the New York Daily News reported. "There's no way the world should not know what Mr Monderoy did here." A jury found that Monderoy and his friend grabbed Tommy Two Times, took him to an abandoned apartment in their Crown Heights tenement, doused him with lighter fluid and lit him afire in the 2008 attack. "This was not a whim, not a fleeting decision in a teenager's mind," said prosecutor Josh Charlton.

The guilty verdict in March marked the first time DNA evidence led to a conviction in an animal abuse case in the history of the state and possibly the United States. Tommy was found badly burned outside the tenement and investigators were able to trace the crime back to Monderoy's lair. That evidence also helped bring more serious burglary charges, for which Monderoy got two to six years upstate. He also received the maximum sentence of two years for aggravated animal abuse and up to four years for arson, all running concurrently. Monderoy's attorney asked that his client be treated as a youthful offender and that the court seal his record. Judge Gary refused, even after Monderoy apologised. "I'd like to say I'm sorry for what happened," Monderoy later told the judge. "What I did was wrong", he said.

Source: Trinidad Express