MEMPHIS, TN - No one is more aware of the hypocrisy and the irony surrounding the problems at the Memphis Animal Shelter than Jamario Taylor. He's a former Shelby County Deputy Jailer who is passionate about pit bulls. He was raising more than a dozen of them until the cops took his animals away last summer, claiming he was an abusive owner.
For weeks, Taylor says he called the shelter to find out what was going on with his dogs. When he finally got an answer, Taylor says it broke his heart.
"After 37 days of them saying that I had mistreated my dogs," he says, "I finally got to see them. And my dogs had been starved down."
Taylor's story starts on August 6th, the day the Memphis Police Department's Organized Crime Unit knocked on the front door of his home in Whitehaven, a door where a sign reads: "All dogs are pets. Pit bulls are family."
OCU, he says, accused of him of running a dog fighting ring and confiscated all 14 of his pit bulls from his backyard.
According to a police affidavit, most of the dogs appeared to be malnourished. Some were chained up in mud puddles several inches deeps. Several had bite wounds.
Investigators tell myEyewitnessNews.com that they found a treadmill, a weight sled and a blood-soaked mattress in the backyard along with a stick that said "Screw PETA" on it along with four dog fighting magazines.
Taylor and his wife, Franchesca Morgan, were arrested and charged with dozens of counts of cruelty to animals.
But Taylor says the real abuse happened when his dogs were taken into custody at the Memphis Animal Shelter.
"They said two of them died in the cage," he says with disbelief. "One of them they had to euthanize. And a couple of them, they couldn't even find the paperwork on them."
Five of Taylor's dogs, he was told, had just simply disappeared from the shelter. According to sources, his two dogs that died in their cages, starved to death just like puppy #199287. She was the adorable pit-mix whose skin-and-bones pictures shocked the Mid-South. Her death, and the deaths of Taylor's dogs, are what sparked a major investigation into animal abuse at the shelter.
On Monday, October 27, 2009, the Shelby County Sheriff's Office raided the shelter, confiscating boxes of records and documents. 10 employees along with the shelter's director, Ernest Alexander, were initially suspended, but returned to work a few days later. Memphis Mayor A C Wharton established a task force and assured the public that his office was conducting a full investigation.
Thursday, November 5th, more than 100 people gathered outside the shelter for a candlelight vigil in honor of the mistreated animals. Many demanded the firing of Alexander and all the employees.
Alexander is named in the search warrant that led to last week's raid. So is another employee named Ivan Russell, a field supervisor at the shelter. Sources tell myEyewitnessNews.com that Russell was in charge of Jamario Taylor's dogs.
An Eyewitness News investigation revealed that Russell is a convicted felon, a drug dealer, who was hired at the shelter through former Mayor Willie Herenton's "Second Chance Program" aimed at getting felons back in the workplace.
Jamario Taylor doesn't begrudge anyone the opportunity to put their life back together. But as he shows off pictures of his pit bulls, including a magazine that has him and one of his prize-winning dogs on the cover, he shakes his head.
"That's Aragon," he says pointing to the dog in the magazine. "They took him, too. I'm not gonna judge anyone. But my dogs never got a second chance."
Taylor denies operating a dog fighting ring. He says his dogs' injuries occurred during "yard incidents", fights between aggressive males. The treadmill was for training them for dog shows. As for the "Screw PETA" stick, he says he got it at a show and used it to break up his dogs when they fought.
"You can't put your hand in between two dogs when they're fighting," says Taylor, "they'll bite it off. The stick came with those words on it. That's just freedom of speech."
The Memphis Animal Shelter, he says, wants to charge him thousands of dollars in "storage fees" for holding his dogs. Fired from his job as a deputy jailer, he can barely pay the mortgage and doesn't have that kind of money. Even if he did, he says, the shelter doesn't deserve a dime from him for the way it treated his animals.
"They took my dogs out of a relatively good home," says Taylor, "where my kids feed them every day. And they took them there. And they starved them. And they put them to sleep. You know, that's just crazy."
Late Thursday night, Mayor Wharton fired Ernest Alexander. Ivan Russell and two other employees are once again suspended, with pay, until the investigation is completed.
