A father and son who beat a cat to death before leaving his carcass onto a Brooklyn street pleaded guilty on Thursday to animal cruelty charges, according to law enforcement officials.
Under the terms of a deal reached with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, the father, Jean Roger Murat, 61, and the son, Robenson Murat, 30, will each be sentenced to 30 days in jail and five years’ probation and will be barred for life from owning an animal.
The attack on the cat, a 1½-year-old male domestic shorthair, was in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on July 12.
A witness told the police at the time that he had heard a strange noise coming from the Murat home and went to investigate.
He told the police that he saw the father hitting a black cat with a stick while the son hit the cat with a pillowcase weighed down by a heavy item. It was unclear where the witness was when he saw the beating.
The Murats then placed the cat inside the pillowcase before trying to dispose of it.
At first, Jean Murat took the dead cat out of the pillowcase and placed its bloodied body on a nearby street corner, according to the authorities. But by the next morning he had decided to put it back in the pillowcase and dump it in a garbage pail near their home.
The witness called the police, who in turn notified the humane law enforcement department of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
In a search of the Murat home, investigators from the Police Department and the A.S.P.C.A. found a broken stick in the attic along with cat fibers and blood.
Investigators also found a partial cat claw, a tuft of cat hair and cat feces. The blood was sent to the veterinary genetics laboratory at the University of California at Davis to determine that it belonged to the dead cat.
The father and son both told investigators that they did not consider the cat to be their pet, according to the authorities.
Robenson Murat said his mother would feed the cat after it showed up on the steps of their home a little more than year before the attack.
An examination of the dead cat by Dr. Bonnie Wong of the Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital, summarized in the criminal complaint, found that the cat had suffered “bruising to the brain, bruising to the spinal cord, bruising to the lungs and liver, bruising to the ribs, and bleeding to the mouth and nose, causing death of said cat.â€
