On Thursday, April 22, when I arrived home from work our cat Tuffy was not there waiting for me as he always has. I whistled and called for him (this was a wonderful cat that would come running to me when I whistled) but he still did not appear. I then started walking through our neighborhood in search of him. As I approached the city storm drain across from our house, I heard him meowing. I saw wads of his fur at the entrance to the storm drain and immediately concluded that he had been in a fight. (There is an aggressive cat in our neighborhood and I suspected that he and Tuffy had fought). I continued to call and try to coax him out, but all he did was continue to meow, sometimes quite loudly. I then concluded that he could not get out because he was injured. My husband and I tried to lift the cover off the storm drain but could not get it to come up and realized that we needed help in order to rescue Tuffy.
One of my first thoughts was to call the fire department thinking that they could respond more quickly than any other organization. When I called them, the person I spoke with apologized but said she could not help because that was beyond anything that was in their area of responsibility. I then turned to our Falls Church City Police Department who in turn put me in touch with the city's animal warden. At that point it was about 5:45 p.m. I told her that I believed Tuffy was injured, gave her all the reasons why I believe he was injured and asked for her help in rescuing him from the storm drain. She replied that cats do not kill other cats when they fight, that he was simply terrified, that he would come out in his own time and that she would not be able to get anyone to help me until the next day. She was quite insistent that she would do nothing to provide any assistance until possibly 8:30 or 9 the next morning.
I was up all night checking my front door to see if Tuffy had come home and I went over to the storm drain a number of times during the night to call for him. At that point he was no longer responding to my calls. In a near panic, I saw that my neighbor Council member Sam Mabry's lights were on at 6 a.m. Shortly after 7 a.m, I could wait no longer, so I called Sam, explained what had happened and asked for his help. He cut short our conversation, immediately called the City Manager who in turn immediately contacted Richard Goff, our Environmental Services Supervisor. Within five minutes, Mr. Goff appeared at my home, removed the cover from the storm drain and found our beloved cat dead. Tuffy's injuries, as it turns out, were far more extensive than he would have sustained in a cat fight alone.
At around 8:30 that morning I called the animal warden and told her that I wanted her to know what when I called the day before and asked for her help, Tuffy was alive and that by the time, through my own devises, I was able to get help, my cat was dead. Her response was, "Well, you shouldn't have let the cat out." Throughout the entire ordeal, I don't know what the animal warden could have said or done that would have been more condescending, arrogant and dismissive of my need for help. We deserve much, much better than this.