Dog lover agrees to stay away from witnesses against him

Dog lover Randy DeCarlo has agreed to a consent order to have no contact with any of the six witnesses who helped put him on probation for violating Gwinnett County’s noise-nuisance ordinance.

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Randy DeCarlo has agreed not to have contact with any of the witnesses against him for violating a county noise ordinance.

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The order, signed Wednesday, modifies DeCarlo’s terms of probation and allows him to stay out of jail.

DeCarlo had faced up to $24,000 in fines, 12 years in prison, and possibly losing all of his 25 dogs when he went to court last year. Instead, he was placed on supervised probation for two years.

DeCarlo said he was being dragged into court because witnesses alleged he had harassed them since his original case.

Wednesday’s consent order may put a halt to DeCarlo’s recent public campaign against Lilburn City Councilman Eddie Price, one of the witnesses at his hearing. DeCarlo has pointed out at public meetings that the councilman and his wife had recently been assessed back taxes for a homestead exemption on a piece of rental property near DeCarlo’s rural Lilburn home.

Records from the county assessor’s office show that as a result of an anonymous tip received Feb. 25, an audit was performed on the property, and bills for three years were sent out totaling $1,786.86.

Price said there was no deception intended. The house is not in his name. It belonged, he said, to his wife before they were married and was paid for through an escrow account. After the marriage, he said, no one thought to go into the escrow account and change it.

“When that was brought to my attention,” Price said, “we immediatley called the county and said, ‘Hey, he’s right. She should have had this removed, please remove it and figure out what we owe you.’ “

As for DeCarlo, he wants off supervised probation.

“Since the day of the trial, I’ve made a commitment to comply with the order of the court to make sure my dogs didn’t cause any problem in the neighborhood, and that hasn’t happened,” he said.