A Little Rock district judge set bail at $100,000 for a man arrested Tuesday night in what city officials are calling an “unusual” case of animal cruelty.
Matthew Maul, 32, of Little Rock was arrested at his 3 Meredith Court apartment and charged with one count of aggravated cruelty to a dog, cat or horse, nearly a month after a neighbor’s boyfriend said he saw Maul toss the carcass of a bound kitten over his balcony after Maul paid for a pizza.
Maul pleaded innocent Wednesday morning to the Class D felony, punishable by up to six years in prison, in Little Rock District Court, where Judge Alice Lightle raised his bail by $95,000, according to court records.
Police said that Maul had acquired or “adopted” a dozen cats over the past several months, though most of them are unaccounted for, except for a 2-month-old kitten, which police said had suffered a serious trauma and its body was found with duct tape wrapped around the paws.
According to Maul’s neighbor, Lisa Coggins, Maul had behaved oddly since moving in nearly six months ago.
“He was very distraught. He told me how he used to be a paramedic but lost his license… and his wife and all kinds of things,” Coggins said. “He’s telling me he’s distraught and doesn’t know where to begin, how he hasn’t lived on his own for a while… he felt very overwhelmed by it all… so I said, ‘Let me come in and I’ll help you get started with cleaning your place.’”
Coggins said that when she helped him clean, she noticed he had two cats. One had duct tape on its paws - Maul said it had been scratching him - and she told him he couldn’t do that to a kitten, Coggins said.
“I wish we would have put two and two together earlier,” Coggins said.
According to detectives, Maul adopted seven kittens from a Little Rock PetSmart location during the summer and five more from the Humane Society of Saline County, later “binding their paws with duct tape, drowning them, and gouging their eyes out” according to police reports.
Coggins said that she and others had noticed dead cats near the property.
Coggins said she got a text from Maul on Sept. 7 with a picture of a kitten in duct tape and an accompanying message, “The Look of Sheer Terror still 30 minutes after vacuuming a different room.”
Coggins said she found the kitten’s body on the porch she shares with Maul a few days later, but that it later vanished.
On Sept. 9, while waiting for Coggins to pack a bag to leave her apartment and get away from her strange neighbor, Coggins’ boyfriend, Phillip Tell, watched a pizza deliveryman go to Maul’s door, where the dead cat was still lying.
The deliveryman, John Plumley, told police he saw the dead cat when Maul opened the door and that Maul “grinned as if in approval” of the corpse.
According to Coggins, Maul later picked up the body and tossed it over the rail “like a sack of trash.”
Police and animal-control officials said they recovered the dead kitten, and when they asked Maul about the other cats, he told them he’d given them away but he couldn’t tell the officials to whom.
Tracy Roark, head of the city’s Animal Services Division, declined to comment on the Maul investigation, though he said its scope was unusual.
“I don’t think it’s ordinary,” Roark said. “I think you’ll have some hoarding people and stuff like that [involved in animal cruelty]… but there’s nothing about [Maul’s arrest] that’s ordinary.”
Police spokesman Sgt. Cassandra Davis said her agency doesn’t investigate many cases of felony animal cruelty, and she was unsure whether the detectives’ findings in Maul’s case were typical in such investigations.
Maul’s arrest is not the first time a detective has looked into accusations of cruelty toward cats.
In November 2010, Little Rock police received several reports of missing cats in the Hillcrest and Stifft Station areas. One resident said he spotted a man trying to stuff his cat in a cooler.
The resident, Antonio Solares, scuffled with the man, who fled after striking Solares with a stick, leaving behind a library book as well as the cooler with the cat inside.
A neighborhood group formed to police the “catnapper” after word spread about the incident and continued to watch out for animal cruelty after police made an arrest in Solares’ battery.
James Michael Anderson Jr. pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of theft and battery in that attack.
Davis said detectives are not currently investigating any link between Maul and the cat disappearances three years ago.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 10/03/2013