Two Sworn, Gun-Toting Peace Officers Protect the County's Animals

The FBI spotted the correlation years ago, he said, between the way people treat their animals and how they relate to fellow human beings. "There's never been a serial killer that didn't abuse animals," Timmers observed, and though he has scant experience with serial killers, he does believe animal abuse is often an indicator of domestic abuse.

Take the man who lured his girlfriend's Chihuahua with a piece of chicken and then stepped on its head, or the man who crushed a puppy's skull with a brick to teach his son "a lesson." The animals in such cases are used as a tool of control, he said; eventually, the abuser will move on to the family. He mentioned the case of Jacob Israel San Roman, the young husband and father who told his family, "This is what I'll do to you if you don't shape up!" San Roman then threw the family dog from the second-story balcony, leaving it to scream in the courtyard with two broken legs. When Timmers arrived, San Roman told him, "What would you rather I do – beat my kids and my wife or throw my dog off the balcony?"

Timmers had no answer to that question, but simply knew San Roman was in need of some "serious intervention." By getting such characters under the supervision of the courts, the officer believes he does the community a service. That's certainly true in the case of the juvenile who used a pit bull in an attempt to mug a woman pushing a baby stroller, and in the case of 23-year-old Haley Lyn Griffin, who directed her own pit bull against a 14-year-old Hispanic girl, shouting all the while, "Fucking wetbacks should go back to Mexico" and "Get her! Bite the bitch!"

Timmers despises no one, however, more than he does dogfighters, nor, it seems, does Smith, the prosecutor, who recently helped to make dogfighting a felony in Texas, punishable by a year in prison.

Dogfighters are often involved in other crimes, but Timmers at least seems to pursue them mainly for what they do to their dogs — "just getting total gratification watching ears bitten off, innards ripped out." Timmers has seized hundreds of fighting dogs and, like most of the sick and hostile creatures he impounds, they invariably must be killed. The dogfighters, in turn, send him death threats for killing their dogs but nonetheless return to dogfighting, just as Timmers continues trying to jail them.

"I'll be damned if I give up," he said. "I don't have the personality to give up." At the end of the day, the animal cruelty investigator goes home to no human being, only to four yapping Chihuahuas. Saving just one life would make it all worthwhile, he said, and he has rescued these four. Chihuahuas are "fearless little creatures that have no sense when it comes to their size," he said. "You've got to love something like that."
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At the trailer off Cullen, Timmers looked inside the cage. There was an overturned bowl, and evidence, he noticed, that the dog had done "some clawing before he died." The corpse was still bloated; there were no maggots yet. The Humane Society's veterinarian estimated death at sometime in the previous 12 hours.

"Police! Policía!" Timmers called out, but still no answer. The back door was open, so he wandered inside, into a dim place of rotten floors and filth and sheetless beds. Whoever lived here existed scarcely better than the dogs. And on the porch, there was a child's pair of rubber boots and near it a child's bicycle.

Timmers called in the rescue van. The three dull pit bulls were led away, and later he would come back with Leone to seize another nearly dead pit bull found in a field, and also the five thin horses. Maybe later he would contact Children's Protective Services, but this was only the start of the investigation. All he knew at the moment was that whoever let their dog die and rot in a crate in the sun was probably "not admirable people."

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