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Thread: 2nd animal control officer arrested.

  1. #31
    Member Eat My Gun's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by cdkscully View Post

    Kindly contact:
    Judge Richard B. Scott
    West Seneca Town Court
    1250 Union Road
    West Seneca, NY 14224

    Phone: 716.558.3247
    Fax: 716.674.0518


    (Grasso\'s Attorney) City Attorney, Arc Petricca cityattorney@ci.lackawanna.ny.us
    716.827.6479
    I'm sure Judge Scott is above giving in to political pressure but I find it disturbing that anyone would solicit people to contact a Judge in regards to a case to be heard in front of him. Lobbying like that has no place in the application of law. To even attempt to influence a judge shows a serious lack of respect for the judge and the fundamental priciples upon which our criminal justice system is based.


    "I won't live by rules that make no sense to me." - Evan Tanner 1971-2008

    Transfixus sed non Mortuus

  2. #32
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    Thumbs down

    Quote Originally Posted by Eat My Gun View Post
    I'm sure Judge Scott is above giving in to political pressure but I find it disturbing that anyone would solicit people to contact a Judge in regards to a case to be heard in front of him. Lobbying like that has no place in the application of law. To even attempt to influence a judge shows a serious lack of respect for the judge and the fundamental priciples upon which our criminal justice system is based.
    Tell us, how were unions created? Did it just happen? Did you learn nothing from Norma Rae?

    How were/are certain laws enacted and passed?

    How does the government know what laws should be made?

    How was our country formed?

    By fighting, protesting and lobbying.

    Your comment reflects your inapt ability to understand the concept of law and the right to speak up for injustice for which this country was built upon.

    Free speech.

    Freedom.

  3. #33
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    Quote Originally Posted by cdkscully View Post
    Tell us, how were unions created? Did it just happen? Did you learn nothing from Norma Rae?

    How were/are certain laws enacted and passed?

    How does the government know what laws should be made?

    How was our country formed?

    By fighting, protesting and lobbying.

    Your comment reflects your inapt ability to understand the concept of law and the right to speak up for injustice for which this country was built upon.

    Free speech.

    Freedom.
    sorry to butt in but, please be careful of the pro union stance around some of us.... I in particular break out in a rash.

  4. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by Save Us View Post
    sorry to butt in but, please be careful of the pro union stance around some of us.... I in particular break out in a rash.
    Work for the Time Warner Call center downtown and then think about unions.

    You would be surprised how much "pro union" you would be after working for the Nazis.

  5. #35
    Member Eat My Gun's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by cdkscully View Post
    Tell us, how were unions created? Did it just happen? Did you learn nothing from Norma Rae?

    How were/are certain laws enacted and passed?

    How does the government know what laws should be made?

    How was our country formed?

    By fighting, protesting and lobbying.

    Your comment reflects your inapt ability to understand the concept of law and the right to speak up for injustice for which this country was built upon.

    Free speech.

    Freedom.
    Protesting and lobbying the judiciary to enact laws??? I could be wrong but I believe thats a function of the legislature.

    The judiciary is supposed to be above politics and apply the laws as passed by the legislature impartially, regardless of the whims of public opinion.

    It's interesting that you mention free speech and freedom, but are completely ignorant of the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence.

    Your comment reflects your inept (not inapt) ability to understand the fundamental principles upon which our criminal justice system is based.


    "I won't live by rules that make no sense to me." - Evan Tanner 1971-2008

    Transfixus sed non Mortuus

  6. #36
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    Quote Originally Posted by cdkscully View Post
    Work for the Time Warner Call center downtown and then think about unions.

    You would be surprised how much "pro union" you would be after working for the Nazis.
    Go look for a new job if your not happy.

  7. #37
    Member zanna vaida's Avatar
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    Thumbs up

    or you can always work for the government. Make sure you understand their mission statement.

  8. #38
    Member Eat My Gun's Avatar
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    cdkscully

    no rebuttal?


    "I won't live by rules that make no sense to me." - Evan Tanner 1971-2008

    Transfixus sed non Mortuus

  9. #39
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    Updated: 02/10/09 08:17 AM
    Lackawanna animal officer defends shooting of cats
    By Gene Warner
    NEWS STAFF REPORTER
    Lackawanna animal-control officer Frederick S. Grasso finally got his day in court Monday, testifying that he shot and killed three cats last June only after they had hissed and spat at him from the basement of a Lackawanna apartment complex.

    “I opened the door, I took two steps downstairs, and three cats — the mother and two kittens — came at me,” Grasso testified at his daylong trial on two misdemeanor charges. “They were all hissing and spitting at me.”

    Grasso then went back to his vehicle and grabbed his rifle.

    “At that point, the safest means to dispose of those cats was to shoot them,” Grasso told West Seneca Town Justice Richard B. Scott.

    The case was transferred to West Seneca because it had generated so much comment and publicity in Lackawanna.

    Asked later by defense attorney Arcangelo J. Petricca whether he had any alternative to shooting the cats, Grasso replied: “No, I don’t believe there was any alternative. There was no safe way to remove those cats.”

    The nonjury trial also heard testimony from six prosecution witnesses and three defense witnesses. After the daylong proceeding, Scott reserved decision until Feb. 20.

    The conflicting testimony presented two widely varying accounts of the three cats that were shot June 10 on Eagan Drive.

    Prosecution witnesses, including neighbors and officials of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, portrayed the slain cats and four surviving kittens from the same family as docile, friendly animals that purred and even jumped onto neighbors’ laps.

    Barbara S. Carr, executive director of the Erie County SPCA, examined the four surviving kittens about two weeks after the shootings.

    “They were perfectly normal kittens,” Carr told the court. “They were friendly, purring, liked to be touched and didn’t struggle to get away.”

    Michael P. Felicetta, an Erie County assistant district attorney, asked Patricia Murtha, a neighbor from Eagan Drive in Lackawanna, whether the mother cat was aggressive.

    “No way, no way,” she replied. “Any time she came over, she craved attention.”

    Several other witnesses provided similar descriptions of the cats’ behavior.

    “[Grasso] would have you believe that the mother and her two kittens turned evil, turned nasty [that day],” Felicetta said in his closing statement.

    During the trial, Scott viewed a DVD shot by SPCA Peace Officer Charles Braun about two weeks after the shootings and depicting the four surviving kittens as very playful.

    “This has absolutely nothing to do with June 10,” Petricca objected. “It doesn’t help evaluate the situation on June 10. . . . It’s irrelevant.”

    Much of the prosecution testimony earlier in the day focused on witnesses who had heard Grasso admit the shootings. But that testimony became moot later in the trial, when Grasso admitted to having fired the three fatal shots.

    Earlier, defense witness Vera Bink, the rental manager for the Eagan Drive apartment complex, told the court about the phone call she made to Grasso after having been confronted by the mother cat in the basement.

    “I told him on the phone, ‘Be careful. Take caution. . . . The female cat hissed at me, and she was ready to charge the stairs,’ ” Bink said.

    “She was afraid to enter her basement, and she feared for the safety of her tenants,” Grasso testified about Bink.

    Grasso faces two unclassified misdemeanor charges under the state Agriculture and Markets Law, one for cruelty to animals, the other for euthanizing a dog or cat by gunshot.

    The law on which the second charge is based states that no one may euthanize a dog or cat by gunshot, except as an emergency procedure for a “dangerous dog” or a severely injured dog or cat.

    As Felicetta pointed out, the statute doesn’t talk about a “dangerous cat,” and there’s no evidence or testimony that any of the cats here were severely injured.

    But Petricca, in his opening statement, argued that the euthanasia charge should be dismissed.

    “This is not a euthanasia case, your honor,” he said. “This is not a Kevorkian-type killing.”

    gwarner@buffnews.com

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  11. #41
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    Quote Originally Posted by Surfing USA View Post
    damn your good. he should of been fired.. the judge im sure is in the good old boys club...

  12. #42
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    03/01/09 07:00 AM


    Cat killer shouldn’t be back on job

    Donn Esmonde

    The white blanket still is there, on the shelf in the basement storage unit. Jackie Ceccarelli laid it there last spring, soon after the gray cat— clearly pregnant—came in through the broken cellar window. It walked up to her, purring.

    It was the start of a nice friendship, a friendship that continued as the cat bore six kittens on that same blanket. The friendship grew as Ceccarelli, 22, and others in the Lackawanna apartment complex fed and petted the new mother. The friendship expanded to include the pet’s attendance at backyard cookouts.

    The friendship between the stray— abandoned when a family moved out— and residents in the brick, four-unit apartment buildings ended June 10. On that day, what sounds to me like an out-of- control animal control officer shot the mother cat dead in her basement home, along with two of the kittens.

    Fred Grasso—responding to what residents think was a complaint about a different cat— claimed in court he acted after the “hissing” cat and kittens “came at me.” The very idea of an “attack cat” sounds bizarre to me. Nor can I fathom why a man with a .22-caliber rifle felt threatened by a 10- pound cat and 6-week-old kittens. Nor do I understand why an animal control officer who supposedly feared that the cats were rabid—as Grasso claimed— discarded the corpses in a landfill, instead of preserving the bodies for testing.

    It gets worse. I recently went to the building where the cats were killed. Grasso—despite the possibility of a ricochet— fired the rifle in a cellar with concrete walls and floor, four furnaces, four water heaters and two apartments directly overhead.

    West Seneca Judge Richard Scott last week—to the disbelief of Ceccarelli and other residents, to the outrage of SPCA officials—dismissed animal cruelty charges and said Grasso was justified in executing the cat and kittens. We got a decision, but not justice.

    At very least, Grasso showed such massively poor judgment that he should be taken off the job. I would not want this guy carrying a loaded rifle in my neighborhood. Yet Lackawanna Mayor Norm Polanski put Grasso back on the street.

    “Did he use poor judgment? I don’t know, I wasn’t in that basement,” Polanski said. “The judge said he did the right thing, and that’s where it ends in my eyes.”

    Grasso’s attorney called the cat and kittens “feral cats . . . a wild cat family.”

    That is not what I heard.

    “We’d have cookouts, and the mother cat would sit with us and we’d pet her,” Ceccarelli, a service station manager, told me. “The kittens were the size of your hand . . . Nobody here was afraid of these cats.”

    Patricia Murtha lives across the street. She met the “attack cat” when it rubbed against her while she was gardening.

    “She’d let us pet her, and then she’d run back to the basement to be with her kittens,” said Murtha, 58, a nurse’s aide. “She was such an affectionate cat . . . None of us can believe the judge let [Grasso] go.”

    Murtha saw Grasso go in the building that day with a rifle and a black garbage bag. The bag was full when he came out.

    “He dropped the bag on the ground, like [the cats] were garbage,” Murtha said. “I cried when he told me he killed them . . . He said the other [four] kittens ran under the dryer, so he couldn’t get them.”

    Grasso did not return a call for comment left on his answering machine.

    The four surviving kittens, healthy and friendly, have since been adopted. But the mother cat and two kittens are dead. Fred Grasso, and his rifle, are back on the street.

    Which ought to make for a lot of nervous animal lovers in Lackawanna.

    desmonde@buffnews.com

  13. #43
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    Quote Originally Posted by Eat My Gun View Post
    no rebuttal?
    No.

    He's off the hook and back on the job.

    You've done well.

  14. #44
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    Quote Originally Posted by WNYresident View Post
    Go look for a new job if your not happy.
    I already did that a$$hole and am working someplace else.

    It's YOU'RE which equals YOU ARE not the use of the word YOUR which is possessive. Did Buffalo Public Schools fails you?

  15. #45
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    Quote Originally Posted by cdkscully View Post
    I already did that a$$hole and am working someplace else.

    It's YOU'RE which equals YOU ARE not the use of the word YOUR which is possessive. Did Buffalo Public Schools fails you?
    Are you a free Cheeser?You sound like a free cheeser? How is that job at the crap plant going?

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