‘Serial dog-killer’

Second victim was girlfriend’s poodle: DA

An Upper West Side mom told Manhattan jurors Monday her ex-boyfriend fatally beat her poodle while she slept in another room — and prosecutors claimed it wasn’t the first time he’d brutalized a lover’s dog.

“I looked down and there was Snoopy — stiff, not moving — her eyes were sunken into her head . . .I touched her and she was cold and hard,” said Taly Russell at Anthony Pastor’s animal-cruelty trial.

Russell, the CEO of executive recruiting firm Sil- verchair, rushed Snoopy’s corpse to the vet on Aug. 4, and insisted on a necropsy. At the time, she did not suspect her beau.

The little pooch (inset), whom Russell described as a “ball of fluffy cuteness,” had nine broken ribs, a kidney that was torn in two, a damaged liver and spleen, and internal bleeding.

“The whole thing didn’t make any sense,” Russell, 45, told jurors in Manhattan Supreme Court before Justice Robert Mandelbaum. “Who murders a dog? It’s just not something people I’ve known do.”

Russell met Pastor, 46, two months after separating from her husband. A few months into the relationship, Snoopy began cowering in his presence, she said.

In a similar incident in 2013, Pastor’s ex-fiancée awoke in his apartment to find her “white fluffy dog,” Molly, dead, said Assistant District Attorney Tanisha Palvia. Pastor’s landlord allegedly saw him beating Molly outside the building days earlier, Palvia said.

After Russell told her estranged husband about Snoopy’s death, he threatened to take custody of their two children if she didn’t leave Pastor, she said.

Defense lawyer Gerald Lefcourt argued the dog, 4, could have been injured the night before when the couple tied her to a fence in Riverside Park while they had sex against a tree.

Pastor could face a maximum of 1¹/3 to four years in prison on the top charge of felony cruelty to animals.