Cat decapitation should have prompted risk exam of Tops gunman, says animal abuse expert

Just weeks after his attack on a stray cat in the garage of his parents Conklin home, Gendron is accused of brutally shooting and killing 10 Black people inside a Tops supermarket in what law enforcement officials have deemed a racist crime motivated by white supremacist ideology.

But as is often the case with animal cruelty, Gendron’s mutilation of the cat appears not to have been reported to authorities and didn’t become publicly known until Gendron revealed it in a racist diatribe he shared on Discord shortly before the slayings.

His parents, Paul and Pamela, told police who raided their home after the shootings that Gendron had recently killed and beheaded a cat, a law enforcement official close to the investigation told The Buffalo News.

“If there are people who ignored the event, that’s really unfortunate. It wouldn’t surprise me, however,” said Philip Tedeschi, clinical professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. “Cats, in particular feral cats, are one of the most harmed animals in the United States.”

How Gendron attacked and killed the cat indicates a level of aggressiveness that would have put his actions into a category of high risk on a scale used by animal cruelty experts in assessing public safety risk, he said.

“Cutting its head off is not a typical behavior. That would be a high-risk behavior for sure,” he said.

Gendron wrote on March 25 that he went into his garage to check on his own screaming cat and found a gray cat attacking her. He said he spent 90 minutes chasing the cat around the garage, stabbing it with a hunting knife, slamming its head and swinging a hatchet at its neck.

He posted a picture of the animal with its head detached inside a shallow grave. 

“Honestly right now I don’t feel anything about killing that cat. I thought I would be in pain but I literally just feel blank,” he wrote.

Several studies have suggested a strong link between animal abuse and mass violence against people. In 2018, researchers examined 20 mass shootings and active shooter cases that involved offenders who had abused animals. The offenders who had abused animals were more likely to be young and white, less likely to die at the crime scene and more likely to kill and wound many victims.

The FBI a few years ago began tracking animal abuse cases as another way of monitoring for mass shootings, serial killings and other violent crimes.

Tedeschi said a lot of violent offenders have had histories of animal cruelty, but he cautioned against oversimplifying the links.

Animal cruelty hasn’t been proven to be a “gateway offense” to serial or mass killing nor is it predictive of somebody’s trajectory toward being a mass murderer, he said.

Doing risk assessment for violent crime is "very tricky science," he added, especially when it comes to mass shootings.

News staff reporter Dan Herbeck contributed to this story.