Former Dallas Animal Services Manager Tyrone McGill's Trial Set to Start This Morning

By Robert Wilonsky Mon., Nov. 7 2011 at 9:06 AM

Categories: City Hall, Crime

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The hole in the animal shelter wall from which they removed the body of the dead cat two weeks after it was first reported to McGill

The chief clerk in Judge Gracie Lewis's courtroom confirms: Jury selection is set to begin this morning in the trial of Tyrone McGill, the former Dallas Animal Services manager indicted in August 2010 on charges of animal cruelty for his alleged role in allowing a trapped cat to die within shelter walls. According to court documents, on May 4 of last year McGill was notified by an animal cruelty investigator that a cat had become trapped in the wall between the break room and the women's bathroom; the investigator and others could hear it trying to free itself "to no avail"; McGill said he'd handle it.

But he didn't, and a week later employees of the shelter could smell the decomposing cat from the break room ... where they ate lunch. It wasn't until May 18 that a hole was cut in the wall and the corpse was finally removed. The indictment accuses McGill of "knowingly and recklessly [torturing]" the animal by his inaction.

For some, of course, there's still the question of why he remains on paid leave. Frank Librio, City Hall spokesman, is checking to see if that's still the case. (Update at 9:38 a.m.: It is. From Librio, via email, "Mr. McGill is on paid administrative leave.") Or, perhaps Interim Assistant City Manager Joey Zapata can answer that question; he's on the list of potential witnesses the District Attorney's Office sent to the court at the end of October, along with Johnnie England of Operation Kindness and Kent Robertson, McGill's former supervisor at the shelter, who resigned in August 2010. The whole witness list follows, as does the DA's jury questionnaire, which asks: Are pets an important part of your life? Well? McGill Jury QuestionnaireMcGillWitnessList

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I am stunned by all this concern for a wild cat when Santana Gaona was allowed to go free and then commit a murder against a human being.
Put this guy in a wall with no food or water - an animal shelter manager should KNOW better and set the example. Why do people like this even get jobs in animal care when they clearly don't give a darn about them? Go work at WalMart with the rest of the people who hate life. To the employee(s) who did nothing - should've grown a pair and bulldozed the wall down if you had to. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
The icing on the vomit cake here is that some City Hall folks who knew about the dying cat - yet did nothing to save it - are now on a no-kill task force called "Dallas Companion Animal Project".
Two things: how the F did govt workers (paid by taxpayers) get job protections that private sector workers could never dream of having? And two, the poor cat died in a building full of workers who are ostensibly there to ameliorate animal suffering. Why? Or is that a stupid question.
Every employee who sat in that breakroom should be as gulity.They sat there every day and listen to cat cry after day one and McGill had not handle it they should have,he was new guy on job.This whole case is about staff resenting a change and allowed a poor animal to suffer.However what goes around comes around they are all being laid off and replaced my contract employees.
On paid leave for a year and a half at $66k per year (according to Dallas' only daily). Neglect a cat... Win $100,000! Game show from hell.
Still on paid leave... a year and a half after the offense. Nice gig.
Why isn't the City Manager firing the executive that gave this chucklehead the job in the first place? Somebody on her team signed off on his hire. He had no qualifications and had no business being there. At some point, making the city look incompetent has to cost someone not supposedly protected by civil service laws his or her job.
I didn't say that it had to make sense ...
Why didn't any of the worker bees at the shelter who are under a guy who is clearly a pathetically under-qualified moron DO something? ("Whoops...I slipped and my heal carelessly poked a hole in that wall....whoa...lookee there, a cat popped out.") That's the question they kept asking during the Nuremberg trials, isn't it?
And a hole had to be cut in the end anyhow to remove the corpse, so the "damaging city property" doesn't wash.
this unfortunate event didn't have to happen this way, with a dead cat and an expensive trial. Shelter workers, thanks for your being there, but doing nothing in the name of job security is as shameful as it gets.
I don't understand the employees who work at the shelter not doing anything. If they all did something what was he gonna do......fire them all? That says something that people at an animal rescue facility would stand by why an extreme form of torture was going on. Maybe they should be replaced.
Apparently they are less than property.
Umm, aren't the animals in the city owned shelter city property?
Because if they did, they probably would have been reprimanded, suspended or terminated over items such as insubordination, damaging city property, etc. From what I have heard fear and intimidation are the two key management methods used at the City of Dallas. In this day and age, most people will not do anything that may jeopardize their employment. If they did break open the wall, the only thing that would have been told to the next prospective employer would have been "damaged city property in direct opposition to supervisor's orders" and left out the part "to remove stranded cat stuck in wall"
Why didn't any of the shelter employees take a hammer to the wall themselves when they realized the situation? "Well, we told the boss, but he didn't do anything" seems kinda lame.
Rot, psychopathic asswipe
I agree with Paul, wall him up. You know if he is found guilty, it will be some short sentence or fine though. Why is he still on paid leave? He should have been fired! I wonder how they evaluate the questionnaire. Are animal rights activists exclude? Of course pets are different than other possessions, like say a microwave oven. They are intelligent, living, breathing, feeling beings.
And to think that Dallas Animal Services came down on a friend of mine for feeding and neutering some feral cats. He was threatened with arrest, a search of his home and citations. And all of this was based on unsubstantiated allegations. Yet the manager can commit an act of outrageous animal cruelty and the city "is still deciding what to do." As far as I am concerned this guy needs to be walled up and left to die.