BEAVER COUNTY, Pennsylvania-NEWS AND COMMENT: This is a report on an online news media channel, Channel 11, which has taken its information from a Facebook post. The post is still live. However, please note that eventually this post will be deleted I expect. It just depends when. The link to the post is at the base of the page but please read my report first as it includes extra information.
The post shows a video of a white pickup truck allegedly driven by Councilman Frank Pagani Jnr. driving down a suburban street in New Galilee. On that street are three cats. They are clearly visible. It is alleged that he deliberately drove into the cats.
Nobody can tell us what happened to the cats. It’s not clear that they were either injured or killed. I would hope that we can be updated on that.
The Facebook post by Bill Bittner of November 30 at 5:47 PM, states that the security camera captured Pagani “running his car purposely into three cats”. That is an unequivocal statement.
Below is a screenshot of the post. I have decided not to show the video on this page because it is difficult to watch and advertisers don’t like these sorts of videos. Below the image is a link to the Facebook post:
Link to the Facebook post by Melissa Yingling and Bill Bittner.
Subsequently the councilman resigned. On the news media article, it states that Bittner said that the vehicle turned into the bend and realised that the cats were on the road but sped up “trying to run down the cats and he was going so fast that he ran the stop sign then proceeded to go right over there to his house.”
The Facebook post resulted in an investigation by Beaver County Humane Society. The Humane Society officers went door-to-door looking for eyewitnesses and information about the three cats who were allegedly hit.
Channel 11 went to Pagani’s door to get his side of the story but nobody answered. Bittner called Pagani and Pagani apparently said that he made a mistake and was giving up his council seat. But Bittner is not happy with that. It is not enough to simply resign his council seat under these circumstances, he believes. What he is implying is that it is possible that Pagani allegedly committed a crime and it should be properly investigated.
And some of the community is angry because they have been implementing a TNR program for years and what if one of these cats is part of that TNR program? The point is that people donate to the TNR program. Some people in the area support the programme and the cats and if one of the cats has been killed deliberately by this man as alleged then it hurts the people as well as the cats.
The Humane Society officer said that it’s an open investigation. I don’t have a report which tells me that the police are involved. Perhaps the groundwork is being carried out and if they decide that it is a crime, they hand over to the police.
I suspect that the problem is whether Pagani allegedly did this deliberately or whether it was accidental. That’s the nub of the matter.
The video was not as bad as originally thought.
There was a cat crossing the street, and a second cat on the sidewalk. The white truck did not swerve to hit the cat but placed the cat between the wheels, straddling the cat. After the truck went over, the cat ran back to the sidewalk and the second cat. They both ran away from the road out of view.
The truck turned the corner and pulled into a driveway. Someone close to where the cats ran, possibly their owner, walked to the driveway where the truck parked. A few minutes later, the man walked back to where the cats disappeared.
I don’t think there was a third cat because the man on foot did not stop in the road. I cannot be sure because there was a parked car blocking an area of the road.