Former rescue advocate guilty in cruelty case

The veteran animal control officer who entered the Honey Brook home of the non-profit Babushka Animal Rescue operation three years ago described the scene as one of the most emotionally traumatic of his career.

“I’ve been doing this for 15 years,” said Russell Harper, the Chambersburg-based humane officer with the Justice Rescue network who was called to investigate reports of animal abuse and neglect at the rural northern Chester County home on Twin County Road. “It was one of the saddest cases I have ever dealt with.”

He found a house that was saturated in animal urine and feces, and filled with small dogs that had obviously been malnourished and neglected. Their coats were matted and covered in fecal matter, and they were skinny and crying. Bones were protruding from under their skin, and they showed visual signs of dehydration.

Most affecting was the sight of an apparently family of puppies who had died while cuddled next to one another in a pen — apparently to comfort one another as they faded away from starvation. Equally as troubling was that other animals owned by the rescue operators were found to be healthy and thriving, and that there appeared to be food and resources that could have been devoted to the others’ care.

It seemed the woman in charge had fed her own pets, but neglected those she had taken in to “rescue.”

“I can’t think of a more hurtful and painful way to die than to be starved to death,” Harper said in an interview Friday. “Somebody who treated animals that way, in my opinion, should no longer be allowed to have animals for the entirety of their life.”

What Russell, and others who saw what had happened at Babushka in February 2020, had hoped for — a lifetime ban on animal for the person who was responsible for the care of those rescues — will not happen. But under the terms of the sentence that was handed down Tuesday by a Chester County Common Pleas judge, the offender will be prohibited from having any personal contact with animals for more than a decade.

Holly Erin Schiller, the owners and operator of Babushka, pleaded guilty before Judge Analisa Sondergaard to seven counts of animal cruelty, each graded as a second-degree misdemeanor. For each count, she was given two years of court super

vised probation that bars her from owning animals or living in a home with pets, or operating any animal shelter, for a total of 14 years. She also received a stern warning from Sondergaard, who had expressed hesitation at accepting the plea agreement that had been presented by the prosecution and Schiller’s defense attorney.

“This is very hard to hear,” Sondergaard said as she considered accepting the proposed sentence. “It is

hard to listen to these facts. I am having a hard time with the fact that she continued to care for her own animals and not the others. It seems to me to be intentional behavior.”

Speaking directly to Schiller, who is currently getting psychiatric counseling for the schizophrenia her attorney said contributed to her lack of care for the rescues, Sondergaard was succinct.

“I am happy your are getting treatment,” she said. “I hope you get the help you need. But the generosity you see here today is limited. If I ever see you again in court, there will be no generosity.”

Schiller, 23, now lives in the town of Finleyville, Washington County with a boyfriend. She did not offer an explanation to the judge for her abuse of the animals in her care, or offer an apology. She chose not to speak on her own behalf, leaving that to her attorney, Terrence Ruf of West Chester.

Ruf said that Schiller, who began the animal rescue in 2018, had been affected by mental health problems that kept her from taking control of the rescue operation and caring for the animals other than her own. “It affected the way she dealt with the situation,” he said. “She concentrated on her own and wasn’t cognitive of everything going on around her.

“She took animals in thinking this was what she wanted to do. But she had a (mental) break, and she was left incapable of asking for help. She was in a very, very bad place at the time,” Ruf said.

Schiller, a small woman with short hair and heavily

tattooed arms, had announced the creation of the Babushka rescue in 2019. In a newspaper story from a Lancaster County publication, she recruited other volunteers who would help her rescue dogs and other animals from around the country, bring them to her home, and then help her find new families.

”I am a one-woman army and can always use the help.,” she was quoted as saying. ”This is more than just my passion; it’s a lifestyle. I want to make a difference for those animals who need it most.”

Three of those who saw the story and responded to Schiller’s invitation to help her spoke at the hearing Tuesday, and said they are still haunted by what they saw when they went to her home on Feb. 15, 2020 qnd discovered the conditions there. One, Katherine Fox of East Brandywine, told Sondergaard that for months afterwards, she would find herself weeping over the fate of the animals she saw.

Her daughter, Hannah Fox, wrote in a letter to the judge that she considered what Schiller had done to the animals to be a “betrayal” of the animals, and also of the ones who had tried to help her.

“She claimed that she loved animals, only to have them succumb to a worse death than they otherwise might have faced,” said Dina DiStefano of Spring City in her comments to Sondergaard. “They didn’t get the help they needed to get well.

“She was supposed to be their voice, but she betrayed them,” Distefano said. “She watched them die. All she had to do was ask for help.”

All three said they wanted the court to keep Schiller from owning or caring for animals again.

The prosecutor in the case, Deputy District Attorney Kate Wright, told Sondergaard that Schiller’s home had been searched on Feb. 15, 2020, after the Justice Rescue had received reports of the conditions there.

In addition to the 21 emaciated and dehydrated dogs and puppies, Russell found four dead rabbits, the three dead puppies, and two dead snakes. One of the puppies had a portion of its face eaten off, which Russell said sometimes occurred when littermates who are starving try to keep themselves alive.

Wright insisted that the conditions of Schiller’s probation would be that she transfer, within 30 days, all of the animals now in her personal care to a neutral third party, unrelated to her or friends with her. Ruf told Sondergaard that her boyfriend has dogs as pets, but that they had been given to members of Schiller’s family. They must now be placed elsewhere, or Wright said she would request that Schiller’s probation be revoked.

Russell, the humane officer, said that the aftermath of the search of Schiller’s home had been difficult, since it was close to impossible to find animal hospitals where the dogs could be cared for. But they were eventually placed, and all but one survived. They have now been adopted by families across the region.