Florida Man Decapitates Family Cat, Displays Head On Stick In Home Backyard, Charged

A Clearwater, Florida, man was arrested Thursday (April 23) for decapitating his family pet and displaying the head on a stick.

According to Clearwater police, the man, identified as 22-year-old Joshua Daniel Pena-Cedillo, attempted to kill his family cat, named Cinnamon, by strangulating it. When the cat didn’t die, he suffocated the feline with a plastic bag.

He then went on to decapitate the cat with an axe. The accused didn’t stop there. He then took the severed head of the feline and placed it on a stick and displayed it in his backyard.

“This morning, our officers charged Joshua Daniel Pena-Cedillo with animal cruelty after he killed his cat, cut off its head and taped it to a stick in the back yard,” the police department tweeted Thursday.

When asked about why he killed his pet in such a gruesome manner, the accused told the police that he wanted to “show what he was capable of to someone he was living with.”

He was arrested and charged with animal cruelty. He was being held in the Pinellas County jail without bail.

The incident comes a few months after a cat was shot with a BB gun in Florida. The feline was found lying in a pool of blood in its caretaker’s driveway. The cat was rushed to a nearby vet for treatment. The vet informed the feline’s caretaker that it was shot by a BB gun and that a bone in the cat’s paw was “completely shattered.” Police started investigating the incident after the caretaker filed a complaint. The investigators checked the CCTV footage in which a neighbor was seen shooting the cat. The man was charged with animal cruelty.

In another incident in October last year, a teen in Sydney, Australia, was charged with animal cruelty for viciously stabbing her pet car before throwing the feline from the second-floor balcony. Police responded to the scene and found the feline lying motionless on the road. The feline was taken to the vet who told the officers that the cat was stabbed 20 times. The owner of the cat was taken into custody and charged with torture, beating and causing the death of an animal.