Katy settles with ex-animal control worker
Chelsea Gerber knew she had to save Petie.
She rescued the calico domestic shorthair kitten when she worked for Katy’s Animal Control Department. Gerber was horrified to discover it was commonplace for the department to immediately euthanize stray cats regardless of the city’s mandatory 72hour stray hold. She knew Petie would be killed, so she took her home.
“In Katy, we weren’t even euthanizing for space,” Gerber said. “They just didn’t want animals in the building.”
Gerber spent months documenting policy violations by staff at the shelter as well as conduct she considered inhumane and unethical after she started working there in 2019. She saw staffers leave animals that had been euthanized overnight in close proximity to live animals. They placed cats in birdcages outside the facility, with crisscross bars that made it hard for them to walk. The dead bodies of animals that shelter employees had discarded in city dumpsters (which were not retrieved by sanitation workers) were returned and stored at the facility in a nearly full freezer. The shelter director, David Brown, would later tell police he was rushing to empty that freezer before he retired.
Gerber hoped the wealth of video and audio recordings, emails, text messages and documents she had amassed would show that the shelter had mistreated cats and dogs. She brought the documentation to the Katy Police Department, city officials and outside agencies, asking for someone with authority to step in for the sake of the animals. Instead, she was fired from her job and her colleagues were cleared.
Gerber sued the city for wrongful termination in 2021, saying she’d been fired in retaliation for her advocacy. The suit said her dismissal violated the Texas Whistleblower Act. Nearly a year later, the city settled with Gerber.
The confidential monetary settlement marks the end of a three-year saga that began when she shared videos and photographs on social media that enraged thousands of animal advocates across the country, placing a glaring spotlight on the fast-growing west Houston suburb.
Katy Animal Control department, the city of Katy, the
Katy Police Department, Brown and another animal control officer accused of misconduct, Spencer Antinoro, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Violating its own rules
Video of a Katy police detective’s interview of Brown and Antinoro in 2021 offers a vivid glimpse into what animal rights advocates like Gerber viewed as an underregulated department run by a director who knowingly violated his organization’s procedures to the detriment of the animals the facility took in. Both men said it was commonplace to kill stray cats deemed “feral” upon arrival, despite the department’s own rule that all pets be kept on a mandatory 72hour stray hold.
“Our facility cannot hold a feral cat, a wild cat, for 72 hours,” Brown told Katy Police detective Lee Hernandez in a small, dimly-lit room in a video filmed in 2021. During the interrogation, Brown grew flustered behind his face mask while Hernandez showed him some of Gerber’s secret recordings.
“I don’t want to watch this anymore. This is a bunch of crap,” Brown said after viewing a few minutes of the first video. He added it was commonplace for a feral cat to be killed and “pass away in the night” and then be “taken care of ” the next morning.
Some of Gerber’s videos show euthanized cats struggling to die, left conscious for extended periods of time.
Protocols for humane euthanasia are focused on ending an animal’s life quickly and painlessly. The Texas Administrative Code requires that euthanized animals be monitored until their time of death. Leaving an animal to “pass away in the night” is a violation of state law, according to Jamey Cantrell, president of the Texas Animal Control Association, the oldest and largest state animal control organization in the country.
Cantrell had no involvement in the investigation, but reviewed details of the allegations for the Houston Chronicle.
The notion that the employees and facility cannot “handle” a feral cat is not valid, Cantrell said, adding that there are tools available for animal control officers to safely handle wild animals. Cantrell said it’s up to a city to police itself and hold its employees accountable for following protocol: “Ultimately, it’s the citizens of Katy (who) … have the power there. If they don’t like how it’s being done, they have to make their voice heard.”
Another issue that raised concerns for Cantrell was the department’s lack of understanding of proper animal disposal. Brown explains in the interrogation video that the department previously disposed of dead animals by burying them on the shelter property. He explained that staff began storing the animals in a freezer after a flood caused the carcasses to surface at the property. Once the freezer started filling up, Brown decided staff would start disposing of carcasses in random city dumpsters, a protocol that a CEO at a local landfill had approved.
“We would go back and keep checking it to make sure it could be disposed of,” Antinoro tells Katy police in the video. “If it didn’t get disposed of, we would pull it out and throw it back in the freezer.”
Cantrell said it is unusual for a city to remove dead animals not retrieved by garbage trucks back to its facility.
In addition to skirting protocol, both Brown and Antinoro’s required euthanasia training documents had expired between 2019 and 2020, according to certificates included in the city’s investigation. The Texas Health and Safety code requires anyone who performs euthanasia to have the required up-to-date training. Performing euthanasia without current certified training is a class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 120 days in jail, a $2,000 fine or both.
Starting over
After years of battling over the shelter’s actions, Gerber is starting over in a new town. She’s helping out more at her daughter’s kindergarten class. And construction has started on her new business, a dog boarding kennel.
She does not regret the time she put in to help the animals. Her efforts did create change: the shelter moved to an electronic records system, it installed security cameras, it’s finally working with volunteers and rescues and appears to be networking animals online.
In October, Katy Mayor Dusty Thiele gave Brown a “certificate of achievement,” thanking him for 30 years of his service with the city.