Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  Another basic rule of journalism: Never believe everything you read in a police press release.

  Sad, I thought, that a man’s best friend caused his demise. I went to see Prince, to find out how all this happened.

  Police had said the dog belonged to the dead man. Not so.

  “He’s my dog,” Kenneth Seay, twenty, proudly told me. “He saved my life once. If he was bigger, Curtis might have had a chance.”

  Prince was just a puppy that nobody wanted when he came to live with the Seay family six years earlier. He grew up in a tiny house with eight children, then four grandchildren. He never bit anybody, they all said, except a man who had once tried to attack Kenneth Seay with a knife and a broken bottle.

  A crazed individual, the man had beaten up his own father and then attacked Seay, a witness to the family fight. Seay tried to back away, stumbled and fell. As the crazed man lunged, swinging the knife, he was attacked by Prince, who “grabbed his leg and left a gash,” according to Seay, who escaped unscathed. The man with the knife later went to jail for stabbing somebody else.

  The first time Prince was hit by a car he was just a pup. Running to fetch a rubber ball for Seay, Prince scampered into the path of a car and was hurled halfway across the street. Another time a car dragged him down the block. He had three other mishaps with autos. Now, family members swear, Prince looks both ways before crossing the street.

  A good watchdog, he once barked at a stranger who pulled a gun and fired. Prince ducked and kept on barking.

  Nobody buys dog food for Prince, who survives on scraps and has never met a veterinarian. He is still scarred from the burns suffered when his drunken tormentor set him on fire.

  Prince and the Seay family lived a block from the murder scene. Gervin, a truck driver with a baby daughter, had met Prince a few years earlier. They liked each other and became friends. Gervin fed the dog table scraps, and Prince began to divide his time and loyalties between the two households.

  Gervin’s neighbors saw Prince often. He never tried to bite anybody, they told me.

  Now police were saying Prince had caused Gervin’s murder. A bad rap, according to those who knew the dog best. His owners, the neighbors and the children who play nearby agreed that all Prince did was try to prevent the killing.

  Neighbors said the long-running feud and the fatal dispute were about parking, a frequent motive for murder in Miami. The killer had a girlfriend who was Gervin’s neighbor in a small quadruplex. There were only four parking spaces. Gervin owned a car and sometimes drove a truck home from work.

  The killer had a gun and a long police record and had been drinking that night. Witnesses said that he muttered some complaint to Gervin, who did not want to hear it. Gervin walked back into his apartment, and the man with the gun followed.

  Prince was outside. The little tan mutt heard a sudden struggle. He dashed in through the open door, bit the killer and hung on to his leg, according to witnesses.

  The man, with Prince still clinging to his leg, jabbed a gun against Gervin’s chest and fired. The bullet blasted a hole in his heart.

  The gunman fled. Prince lay motionless outside the apartment as Gervin was rushed, dying, to the hospital.

  The morning after the murder, I found Prince lying morose and sleepy-eyed in front of the Seay house. He had had a bad night. Those who know him say it was not his fault that his friend was shot.

  Prince did the best he could.

  Many humans return equal devotion to the pets they love. Tony Garcia, sixty-seven, a popular news photographer, dashed back into his burning home after he and his wife escaped unharmed. He fought his way through flames to rescue his best friend, trapped inside.

  He emerged with his clothes on fire, “holding the little dog like a baby,” a neighbor told me.

  Arrow, a bilingual dachshund who responds to commands in both English and Spanish, was singed but not seriously burned. Garcia saved the dog’s life, but it cost him his own.

  Burned over 50 percent of his body, he died two weeks later.

  At age 103, Jose Cuello’s closest friend was his dog. Every morning they walked. They were always together. The old man’s wife had died fifty years earlier. Cuello now spent afternoons in the sun with Surpan, his German shepherd, at his side, telling stories of Cuba to neighborhood youngsters.

  Surpan once attacked a would-be mugger who fled, leaving Jose Cuello unharmed.

  One morning the old man stepped outside and found the dog dying. The veterinarian said that someone had fed him a piece of meat laced with broken glass.

  Jose Cuello cried uncontrollably. He took no more walks, spent no more time sitting in the sun. One day he stepped out of the house where four generations of his family resided and wrapped one end of an electrical cord around a porch railing, the other around his throat. His horrified sixty-year-old daughter cut him down. He was hospitalized, a vertebra in his neck fractured.

  I talked to the man’s thirteen-year-old great-grandson. “He told us he did it because he loved his dog—and missed him,” the boy said.

  The loss of a pet is always painful, but to some people it is the end of the world.

  A newly retired Miamian murdered his wife and killed himself. They had no children, were wealthy and in excellent health. Miami Homicide Detective Louise Vasquez investigated the puzzling murder-suicide and learned the motive: The couple had been grieving and despondent since the death of their best friend, a fluffy black poodle named Midnight.

  “They had him for twelve to fifteen years,” Louise said. “They were really upset about his death.”

  Not everybody understands how strongly some people feel about their pets. Metro’s fire rescue squad responded, lights flashing, siren screaming, to a frantic 911 call for help, but the paramedics refused to treat the victim.

  Candy, a four-year-old West Highland terrier, died.

  “I begged them,” the dog’s owner, a twenty-six-year-old woman, told me. “I was crying. They were laughing.”

  At play on the patio at home, Candy had encountered a poisonous toad. The little dog began to foam at the mouth. The owner called her vet. He was closed and instructed her and her mother to rush Candy to an animal clinic. The address was wrong. Instead of S.W. 132nd Street, the women went to S.W. 132nd Avenue. The mother held Candy. The daughter drove as fast as she could. It was 7:30 P.M.

  “I was so desperate,” she told me. “I knew they could save her if I could get there in time, but I was completely lost. There were no telephones, just dark streets and houses.”

  They stopped a Metro police officer. He led them to an animal hospital. It was closed. He showed them another one five blocks away. It too was closed. “Drive carefully,” he told them and departed. Candy was still alive.

  The woman was desperate. She stopped the car and ran to the nearest house.

  Gloria Rodriguez was home alone with her children. It was after eight P.M. when someone pounded on her door. “She was knocking real hard and screaming like crazy. She said, ‘My husband is dying in the car!’ I said, ‘I cannot let you in my house, but give me the number you want to call.’ She said, ‘Call 911!’ She was going crazy. ‘Please! Please! My husband is dying!’”

  The emergency operator dispatched an advanced life-support system and a crew of three paramedics. As they rolled up to the scene, “a woman waved us down,” fire rescueman Keith Tyson said. “She was crying. She wanted us to help her dog; the dog had stopped breathing. Another woman in the car had a small dog in her lap. She was giving the dog mouth-to-snout resuscitation. She admitted lying, saying it was her husband. She said they were willing to pay us any amount of money to take the dog to a veterinarian or a clinic and they would follow us.”

  Keith Tyson, who owns a Doberman named Magic and a poodle who answers to Tiffany, refused.

  The distraught women drove away. The mother continued breathing into Candy’s mouth and massaging her chest. They finally found the animal
clinic, after 9:00, but it was too late. Candy was almost five years old. She had been one of the family.

  “The firemen just laughed,” her owner said, weeping. “They said, ‘It’s only a dog.’”

  The paramedics were furious when I spoke to them. Tyson had run red lights and counted seconds responding to the “heart attack” call. “I don’t want her to go to jail, but I’d like to see a judge explain the facts of life to her. I like dogs, but I’m not going to risk my life for one.”

  I saw his side. Every year firefighters, as well as innocent victims, are killed or injured en route to false alarms. False reports to 911 are against the law. What if a heart attack victim had needed the advanced life-support system miles away?

  But I also understood Candy’s heartbroken owner.

  South Florida’s poisonous Bufo toads often send animals into fatal convulsions. Here’s what to do: Wash out the animal’s mouth with a garden hose, fast, then run for the animal hospital.

  But first: Be sure you know where it is.

  Outright cruelty to animals is common enough to break your heart. Deranged people poison innocent neighborhood pets with cyanide and strychnine. In one neighborhood two dozen dogs and cats died in their own backyards. The killer was never caught. Some smarmy humans kill pelicans and seagulls for sport.

  And then there was the man from Canada.

  There were half a dozen hungry and homeless stray cats, crying for food at his door. So he began killing them.

  He snared each in a noose on the end of a stick, drew it taut around their throats, then plunged them one at a time into a bucket of water, holding them down until they stopped struggling.

  An outraged neighbor jumped a fence to stop him and saved the sixth cat.

  “It is done all the time in Canada,” Victorian Theoret, sixty-four, blandly explained to the judge, adding that he was a former priest, a Ph.D. and a university professor. He freely testified that he had even killed his own dog in the same manner. An Animal Control officer, summoned by the neighbors, testified that Theoret had handed him the five sodden bodies in a sack, saying, “This is how it’s done in Canada.” Autopsies confirmed mat the two healthy gray-and-white tabbies, two spotted tricolors and a half-grown black cat had been drowned.

  “With all the shootings and murders, you wouldn’t think cats would have that much importance,” defense attorney Leo Greenfield said derisively. In Canada, what his client did is “customary, to get rid of pests,” he said.

  Another defense lawyer insisted Theoret’s method was humane. The judge responded, “Let me ask you, counselor, how you would like somebody to loop a rope around your neck, pull it tight and then drop you in the water?”

  Judge James Rainwater, bless his heart, the same man who locked up errant fathers who failed to pay child support, sentenced Theoret to the max—a year behind bars—for cruelty to animals.

  Sounded right to me.

  Of course the man never did the time. He served two days in jail until a higher court judge ordered his release. An appeal panel later threw out the conviction.

  In Miami it is always something: monkeys, elephants, pigs on the prowl. An irate retired military man, never injured in the service of his country, lost his battle with a neighbor’s pet pig.

  I saw Pigger myself and loved him.

  Lloyd Laughlin, lying painfully in his bed, right leg bandaged, did not.

  “Everybody thinks of a pig as a cuddly little thing,” he muttered through clenched teeth, his injured leg elevated and packed with ice. “It was not a cute little pink pig. It was a miserable monster with black hair and yellow fangs.”

  It’s all how you look at things.

  Pigger had been the beloved pet of Suzanne Banas, twenty-five, since the porker was a day-old orphan the size of a puppy. Pigger rode in the family car, lived indoors and was house-broken.

  Feed a pig and you’ll have a hog, the saying goes. Pigger soon grew too large to clamber into the car or the house. Though she now lived in a pen inside a fenced-in yard, Pigger, at three hundred pounds, still thought of herself as a family pet. She still slept with a blanket and still frolicked with the nine-pound Italian greyhound. They grew up together. Once they were the same size.

  “She still tries to sit in my daughter’s lap,” said Norma Banas, Suzanne’s mother, “and rolls over with her feet in the air to have her tummy scratched.”

  Suzanne Banas wanted to free Pigger in the wild after she outgrew the car and the house, but no wildlife officials could guarantee her safety from hunters. “So we had to keep her,” Norma Banas said.

  Made sense to me.

  The freedom Banas could not give her, Pigger seized for herself. She took off for the outside world while her owners were at work. Her home, a former horse pen, is electrified so she cannot break out, but a fallen tree had disconnected the wires. Pigger found a rain-weakened fence post and forced her way out of the acre-sized yard. Free at last, she trotted down Ninety-third Avenue just before one P.M.

  Neighbors knew what had happened at once. Pigger is popular with their children, who love to feed her and watch her eat (like a pig). Lloyd Laughlin saw her in the street. His wife even snapped a photo of Pigger’s stroll down the avenue. Then Pigger wandered into a neighbor’s yard. “It was rooting a hole in their grass,” Laughlin accused.

  The husky retiree, six feet tall and two hundred pounds, marched out to put a stop to it. “I went to within six feet of it and yelled.” He denied provoking the pig. All he did was say “Yaaaaahhhh!” trying to scare the animal off the neighbor’s lawn. When he turned away, he said, Pigger charged.

  “It hit me in the rear and knocked me down. I’ve never been hit by a car. I think this is what it feels like.”

  He lay still, a tactic learned in military training. The creature stood over him, staring malevolently with little piggy eyes, he said. “It was rooting around my body with its nose, a big nose.” Then it sank a fang into his leg “right between the calf and the ankle.”

  A neighbor ran to the rescue, hurling dirt and sand into the creature’s face to distract her. It worked. “She just walked off,” Laughlin said. His leg bloodied, he ran to dial 911. Laughlin alerted Animal Control and wildlife officers. Metro police dispatched two cars and a helicopter.

  Laughlin, fifty-nine, suffered badly bruised buttocks as well as the bite. “I told the policeman at the hospital that if I had what he was wearing on his hip, I would have blown its head off.”

  Neighbors had called Pigger’s mistress on her job at Miami Children’s Hospital to report her pig on the prowl. She rushed home. So did Pigger, she said. ‘Two guys were following her. She couldn’t wait to get back in her pen.”

  Pigger was a legal resident—the neighborhood is agriculturally zoned—but police cited Banas for “permitting livestock to run at large.” There is no leash law for pigs, but there are livestock laws. Pigger was quarantined for ten days.

  “Pigger is no attack pig,” Banas insisted. Laughlin, she said, “probably scared her, or maybe Pigger was just coming over to say hello and bashed into him accidentally.”

  “It was not coming to say hello,” Laughlin swore, swallowing a pain pill. “It’s fat and it’s big. It’s not like having a little dog. It was walking up the middle of Ninety-third Avenue. It deliberately wanted to knock me down; I know it wanted to bite me.”

  “The pig probably didn’t like this guy for some reason,” an Animal Control officer said. “They are very smart.”

  Irene was a bigger problem, by seven hundred pounds. The baby Burmese elephant ran amok through a Miami neighborhood, ramming two cars, kicking down fences and bursting through a plate-glass window during a twenty-minute, mile-long spree.

  The one-thousand-pound pachyderm panicked at the sound of an ambulance siren and broke away from her trainer as she and a baby baboon were being unloaded for a benefit show at a nursing home.

  Elderly patients caught only a fleeting glimpse of
Irene as she lumbered into careening traffic.

  “She got spooked and ran. She’s really a perfect elephant,” said the trainer, who worked for Hoxie Brothers Circus.

  Irene, age four, stands on her head, waltzes, sits and kneels on command. This time, however, she ignored commands, knocked down her trainer half a dozen times and tried to bite him during the wild chase. A ragtag posse of police, dazed motorists who abandoned their cars, pedestrians, barking dogs and a Miami politician took up the pursuit, scattering for cover several times as Irene charged them, trumpeting angrily.

  She crashed through hedges, trampled flowers and rampaged through several garages. No one was badly hurt, though several persons were knocked off their feet by Irene, who suffered a bloodied trunk.

  “Here comes an elephant!” screamed a woman employee as Irene smashed through the plate-glass window at the Miami Board of Realtors.

  “We heard a godawful crash,” public relations director Rose Light said. “Someone in the front office yelled, ‘My God, it is an elephant!’ The staff was in a state of shock.”

  Trapped in an apartment-house trash bin by two would-be big-game hunters, the five-foot-tall creature shoved their pickup truck back ten yards, crushing the right front fender before she fled.

  City Commissioner J. L. Plummer dodged the irate elephant and scaled a parked tractor screaming, “I’m a Democrat!”

  The chase ended in a backyard. Irene shook off four husky men and did a fancy step out of the chains around her pudgy front legs, but she soon met her match. Miami Police Lieutenant Walter Rodak, a mounted patrol veteran, snatched her ear and talked gently until she calmed down.

  “She’s just a baby,” Rodak said soothingly.

  Hobbled by the chains now double-wrapped around her legs, Irene struggled in vain to escape, until she was finally locked inside the circus van.