I think the fine was failure to appear in court. Not for the loose dogs.
We are reading a TV news article here. And as such it is poorly written.
I agree that the fines and her being jailed for missing her court appearance seems excessive and this judge sounds like an a$$ but this evidently wasn’t a once or twice occurrence. Another article mentions that a local company donated their services to fix her fence so that rather negates the “someone left the gate open one time and my dogs got out this one time when I wasn’t looking” defense.
”Back in May, Root says her pets “somehow” got loose from her yard several times.”
And
“I’m struggling to pay my house taxes. I couldn’t pay it. It’s a different thing when you leave your dogs out and you don’t care. But I do care,” Root said….But when the cancer survivor failed to show up at court on her doctor’s orders, a judge had Root arrested."
But according to this article she had 7 dogs, including 4 that belong to her to her daughter who sounds like she might currently be “homeless”.
It also says she’s taken in strays ….evidently both of the animal and “human” variety.
Although Root said she is close to her animals and her daughter said previously her mother has taken in strays, another member of the family pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges four years ago.
Root's great-granddaughter, Megan Dawn Wagoner, who is now 22, pleaded guilty to one count of mutilating an animal in 2010. Wagoner was living at Root's home at the time and was accused of killing a stray cat, then skinning it.
Wagoner spent two months in jail in 2011.She is currently on supervised probation and has a 17-month-old son.
Gifford said Wagoner, who is her adopted daughter and is the biological daughter of Root's grandson, did not kill the cat, but did skin it, and pleaded guilty on the recommendation of her public defender to get less jail time.
Gifford said her adopted daughter had been told by the person who killed to cat to skin it.
"She didn't think that she was going to do anything wrong, and she's trying to come forward with that," Gifford said.
While I feel a bit sorry for the poor old woman, she also does not seem to have her priorities straight; she’s struggling to pay her property taxes yet has money to care for 7 dogs? And there seems to be a lot of “blame everyone else” and some other weird goings on in that family. Not sure they sound like model neighbors. JM2C.
I think the fine was failure to appear in court. Not for the loose dogs.
She was fined $75 for each dog running loose and some fines for not having dog licenses for 4 of the dogs (I’m guessing the 4 belonging to her daughter) and in another separate and unrelated case, fined for having a dog at large, but she was jailed for failing to show up for her court appearance. I’m sorry but the “my doctor told me not to appear in court” doesn’t pass the smell test. If she was really that ill, her doctor could have called or written a letter to the judge explaining why she was too frail and sickly to appear.
And some are quick to declare her neighbor as being a jerk for reporting her, but then again we don’t know how many times the neighbor had found her dogs running amok all over his property or what other nuisances he might have put up with before he reported her.
FWIW, when my husband and I bought our first house, our next door neighbors had 5 (maybe 6 or 7, it was hard to keep count) big hound dogs. Their yard wasn’t fenced and they used to tie up the dogs with clothes line which often broke. More than once and more than just a few times I had the “Bumpus Hounds” running through my back yard, once running through our back yard cookout, knocking over the kids, jumping up on the picnic table and absconding with hamburgers and hot dogs. One time I had several nearly knock me over as I was bringing groceries from the car to the back door. Reminded me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRdj1Ce4ao
The first time it happened, when I found the neighbors dogs in my yard, I assumed they had gotten loose by accident and being a good neighbor and an animal lover and fearing that they might run into the street and get hit by a car, I got a hold of them and walked them back to my neighbor’s house, introducing myself. And did I get a “Thank you” or even “I’m sorry”? No, the two nasty lesbian “biotches” who lived there and who owned these dogs glared at me as if I had done something wrong and without saying a word or even making eye contact with me, took their dogs back into their house.
Thankfully a year later they sold the house to a nice young couple who later after we became friends, told me how deplorable the condition of the house was, how it smelled of dog urine and how there was dog feces all over the house, how none of the female dogs were fixed and that there was blood stains on the walls and on the raggy carpet, how the lesbians (who refused to speak to the husband during the settlement) were also hoarders and how much work they had to put in to renovate the house before they could make it livable enough to even move in (but then they did get a very good price for it and it was a 200 year old house, that they restored and made absolutely beautiful).
My point is that this article makes the woman out to be a poor victim of a nasty neighbor and an unfeeling judge, but I think, just perhaps that we may not be getting the entire story.