Chester Krawczuk says he was crying when he put a gun against the head of the stray cat that had been hanging around his Marietta home.
He’d trapped the animal and took it behind a Cobb Parkway business a couple of weeks ago.
The 67-year-old admits he missed his mark twice because he was shaking while crying. Krawczuk says he “put the gun up against a four-inch target, and I missed and I missed and, finally, the third shot was it.”
A warrant says the cat was shot three times.
But a witness told police a different account. The witness said she saw him shoot the cat but that he “had a smile on his face throughout the entire incident.”
Krawczuk was arrested May 12 on a felony charge of animal cruelty and misdemeanor count of firing a gun too close to a public road, jail records show. He bonded out hours later.
Officers found the dead cat and a white towel with fresh blood behind the business in the 1200 block of Cobb Parkway near SunTrust Park, according to an arrest report.
The body of another cat that “appeared to have been dead much longer,” was also found.
The witness told investigators that she was sitting in her vehicle in the parking lot when she saw Krawczuk pull up in his white Ford pickup truck, take a cage out of the truck, let the cat out and shoot what sounded like a cap gun three times.
“That sounds so brutal,” Krawczuk told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday. “I have an excuse why that happened ... The animal was terminally ill from what I can tell.”
He also said he has been dealing with the cats coming from his neighbor’s home off Allgood Road for more than a year.
“Tearing up insulation, running all over cars, defecating in my garden, howling at night, roaming where you’d think there were people, burglars, murders in your backyard,” is how he described what the cats had done.
Police have a record of him calling on May 1 complaining about the stray cats and how he wanted them off his property.
Krawczuk said he has trapped the cats before and brought them to shelters only to see them back on his property soon after.
“They’re not friendly. They eat my birds. They eat the squirrels. And they leave the carcass around and I can smell the animal,” Krawczuk said.
Fed up, he said he felt he was left with no other options.
So he kept setting traps and that day he caught the cat, which he said looked ill.
“And you know the rest.”
The witness took a picture of the Florida license plate, which is registered to Krawczuk, according to the arrest report.
When officers came to his home Krawczuk denied shooting the cat even when investigators told him the witness took pictures of his license plate after seeing the shooting. Police described him as frustrated.
Krawczuk, who goes by Chip, said he doesn’t know how there could be any witness because he made sure no one was around.
“I felt stupid for doing it, so I looked around to see,” he said. “I knew it’d be an issue if (someone) saw me blowing off a gun.”
Krawczuk was confused by the charges.
“In my heart, I know I’m not guilty of animal cruelty. If anything, I should be given a ‘that’s a good thing to do Chip.’ ”
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