A woman from Ohio, who was recorded eating a cat in a video that sparked rumors about Haitian migrants consuming pets, has been given a one-year prison sentence. The judge criticized her for the disturbing behavior.
Allexis Ferrell, aged 27, was apprehended at a residential complex in Canton on August 16 after she was filmed on a police body camera devouring a cat while on all fours.
Law enforcement officials later found out that Ferrell had used her foot to crush the cat’s head before proceeding to eat it, as indicated in a police report acquired by the Canton Repository.
‘I did observe blood on Allexis’ feet, hands and fur on her lips,’ an officer who responded to the scene wrote in the report.
Ferrell, a mother-of-three, was indicted on charges of cruelty to companion animals in August, Fox 8 reports.
She initially pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but changed her plea on Monday after a psychological report determined that she was able to understand court proceedings and assist in her own defense.
Yet the report also determined that Ferrell is irritable, aggressive, deceitful, lacks remorse, shows a reckless disregard for the safety of others and fails to conform to social norms with respect to law-abiding behavior by repeatedly performing criminal acts, according to the Repository.
Allexis Ferrell, 27, was sentenced to one year behind bars on Monday on a charge of cruelty to companion animals
‘To me, you represent quite a danger to your community,’ Stark County Common Pleas Judge Frank Forchione told Ferrell at the sentencing hearing on Monday.
‘This is repulsive to me,’ he continued. ‘I mean that anyone would do this to an animal.
‘And an animal’s like a child. I don’t know if you understand that or not.
‘They bring a lot of love to a lot of people. They don’ have a voice. But their voice today is me. I’m going to exercise this voice very loudly.’
The judge went on to say he could not ‘express the disappointment, shock, disgust that this crime has brought to me.
‘I don’t know what could prompt anyone to eat a cat,’ he said, as Ferrell interrupted by saying that is not necessarily what happened, as a spokesman from the Stark County Prosecutor’s Office said she did not have time to eat the full feline because the police were quickly called to the scene.
Forchione concluded by calling Ferrell a national embarrassment as he handed down his sentence, which she will serve consecutively with a separate 18 month sentence the mother-of-three was previously hit with for a 2019 theft and a child endangerment charge from last year.
‘You’ve embarrassed this county,’ he said. ‘You’ve embarrassed this nation. More importantly, you’ve embarrassed yourself.’
Ferrell, of Canton, Ohio, was caught on police body camera footage crouching on all fours and biting into a cat on August 16
She initially pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but changed her plea on Monday
Following Ferrell’s arrest, many conservatives seized upon the gruesome body camera footage to back up claims that Haitian migrants were ‘eating pets’ in Springfield ahead of the presidential election – despite Ferrell being a native of Canton, which is 172 miles from Springfield.
The rumor was even repeated by Trump as he debated Vice President Kamala Harris in September.
‘In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,’ Trump said. ‘The people that came in. They’re eating the cats.
‘They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.
‘And this is what’s happening in our country.’
When he was later told by ABC moderator David Muir that there had been no credible reports to the authorities, the ex-president insisted that had ‘seen people on television’.
‘The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food,’ he added.
President-elect Donald Trump claimed at a debate in September that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio
It later emerged that a Springfield woman first sparked the rumors with a post on social media, saying her ‘neighbor informed me that her daughter’s friend lost her cat’, only to find the pet strung up ‘from a branch’ outside the home of a Haitian family.
But when asked about the claims, the woman, Erika Lee, admitted to NewsGuard that she heard the rumor through her neighbor Kimberly Newton, who heard it through a friend, who heard it from the alleged cat owner.
Newton then said she was ‘not sure I’m the most credible source.’
‘I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,’ she told NewsGuard, a company that counters misinformation. ‘I don’t have any proof.’
She noted that the cat’s owner was ‘an acquaintance of a friend’.
