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Animal advocates push for action

Activists are asking an assistant state attorney in Brooksville to seek justice in two cases involving animal cruelty.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published December 1, 2005

BROOKSVILLE - Richard Brian Daignault pushed his wife, punched his kid and killed the family cat by picking it up and throwing it against a wall, according to an arrest report. Stuart Douglas Harvey allegedly stood on his porch with a .22-caliber rifle and shot a small black dog as it was running toward the boys who owned it and had just gotten off the school bus.

Daignault, 38, of Brooksville, who was arrested in August and charged with domestic battery, aggravated child abuse and cruelty to animals, has a pretrial conference Frida. Harvey, 50, also of Brooksville, who was arrested in April and charged with cruelty to animals, had a pretrial hearing Thursday and a trial scheduled for Monday - assuming no plea deal is reached.

Assistant State Attorney Rob Lewis is prosecuting both cases.

Letters from animal sympathizers from all over America won't let him forget it.

"I'm the cat prosecutor," he said with a smile last week in his Brooksville office.

But it's no joke to someone like Jen Hobgood. The program coordinator from the Humane Society of the United States wrote Lewis letters on both cases.

"I do my best to write letters about as many as I can," she said from the organization's Southeast regional office in Tallahassee. "I try to put my attention to the ones that are especially troubling."

She's not the only one.

Lewis has heard from concerned folks from Herkimer, N.Y., and Round Lake, Ill., to Reseda, Calif., and Arlington, Texas. The letters call for aggressive prosecution and no mercy in any eventual sentencing.

"I've called about every one of them back and at least left messages," Lewis said. "When I talk to them, I want to let them know that there are human lives involved here, too. . . . Yes, it's awful, the cat getting thrown up against the wall, but we're also concerned with the family and the kid."

Animal cruelty happens.

Just in the past month, and just in Florida, a horse got stabbed in Jacksonville, a man threw his mother's pit bull out a fifth-floor window in Palm Beach and a man in Keystone Heights killed and buried his wife's Staffordshire terrier.

Reports of these incidents end up on the Web sites of organizations like the Washington-based Humane Society, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk, Va.

News flashes scroll down the right side of pet-abuse.com: "Dog fatally shot in chest . . . 5-month-old puppy buried alive . . . Pelican killed by stoning."

The Humane Society has activist alerts. The ASPCA has advocacy alerts. PETA has action alerts. So begin all the letters to prosecutors around the country.

"It's not just about animals," the Humane Society's Hobgood said earlier this week. "It's about what that portends for humans."

"It's a fundamental disregard for life and suffering that does not know specific lines," Martin Mersereau, the manager for the domestic animal abuse division at PETA, told the St. Petersburg Times after a Spring Hill family's cat was killed, cut in half and left in a neighbor's yard in June.

In the case of Daignault, a Sheetrock worker who's been in prison four times on convictions for burglary, battery and assault, he was having an argument with his 13-year-old son before he threw the cat against the wall, according to the arrest report. The report says the cat "screamed" and rolled around on the floor before it died. Lewis says it had a five-minute seizure.

Daignault told deputies it was just a family argument.

Public defender David Bauer said Wednesday in his office that his client only "stepped" on the cat by accident.

"What the police officer writes in his probable cause affidavit is only what somebody told him," Bauer said. "This is a whole different story from someone who deliberately shoots an animal or tortures an animal.

Harvey, meanwhile, did shoot an animal, and admitted it. The roofer hit the dog with a bullet to the neck and then began "cussing" at the boys about their dog being a nuisance, according to the arrest report. "For the rest of their life," said Lewis, the prosecutor, "they're going to see that dog running to them - and being dropped by a .22."

Lewis has the letters in a file.

"You have no idea how difficult it is for me to write this letter. . . ."

"Please make sure you prosecute this man vigorously and sentence him to significant jail time and fines. . . ."

"Please do not accept a plea agreement that does not include jail time. . . ."

"People who are violent to animals rarely stop there. . . ."

Harvey doesn't "score" to prison time, Lewis said, but Daignault, given the charges and his criminal record, could get up to 40 years.

They're both due in Circuit Judge Jack Springstead's courtroom.

"Harvey needs to understand that this is not the 1800s on the frontier," Lewis said. "This was not a coyote threatening his livestock. This was a kid's pet."

As for Daignault?

"He needs to be separated from society for as long as possible," Lewis said. "He's not the guy who has a 9-to-5 job who has a bad day.

"This guy . . . he's the guy who gets out and goes and kills his family. This is the type of guy who can't help himself. . . . He is going to go in on his wife and child and beat them till they can't move."

-- Times researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this report, which includes information from the Florida Times-Union and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

[Last modified December 1, 2005, 18:03:57]