Thug crushed kitten then drowned it in bath

A 22-year-old man has been jailed for two months for cruelly ill-treating a kitten he crushed and then drowned in a bath while allegedly being taped on video.

Eamon Patrick McMahon, of Sylvan Hill, Lisnaskea, was released on £500 bail pending the outcome of an appeal against the prison sentence.

He denied the charge, claiming he sat on his friend’s pet kitten accidentally and as it lay yelping on the ground he panicked and drowned it in a bath to “put it out of its misery”.

Sentencing him at Fermanagh Court yesterday District Judge Liam McNally described it as an “absolutely appalling and atrocious scene”.

He said: “One cannot imagine a worse situation for a defenceless animal to face.”

He banned McMahon from keeping animals for two years.

The cat’s owner Daniel Reihill told the court how he had moved out of the house in Trasna Way, Lisnaskea, he shared with McMahon’s brother and cousin.

He said could not take the kitten home with him as his parents had a dog. His intention was to find a new home for it but when he returned to Trasna Way to collect his belongings there was no sign of it.

After hearing rumours about the fate of his pet he confronted McMahon.

Mr Reihill told the court McMahon confessed to sitting on the cat before it was drowned in the bath.

He also said that McMahon told him the scene had been taped on video.

McMahon told the court he had spent the night at his brother’s house and the following morning was “messing about” in his brother’s bedroom when the kitten crawled under a cushion propped against the wall.

He described how he went and stood over the cushion with his back against the wall.

“I slid down the wall but I didn’t intend to slide down so fast,” he told the court.

“I kind of slipped a bit and went down too fast.”

He said he landed on the |cushion and heard a “crunch and crack” sound.

“When we took the cushion away the cat was lying there and there was blood coming out of its mouth and a yelping noise,” McMahon told the court.

He said the kitten “looked a bit mangled” and its back leg was “twitching a bit”. He added that it looked like it was going to die.

“We panicked. We didn’t know what to do,” he told the court.

“We decided to put the cat under water to put it out of its misery, to kill it,” he stated.

McMahon said he put the cat in the bath and filled it with water. He described how he held his hand on the kitten and then another man got a badminton racket and held it under the water.

Afterwards they put it into a bag and dumped it in a ditch.

* Source: The Belfast Telegraph.