Randy Grim with OP / Photography By Kevin Roberts
At every jostle of the stretcher, Brownie flinched. The fire had seared his paws, legs, and ears, charred the skin around his eyes and muzzle, and burned a hole through his cheek.
Dr. Ryan Smith, a critical-care resident at Veterinary Specialty Services, leaned close, examining patches of clammy white tissue rimmed in red—dead tissue, with blood coagulated around the edges.
“I’m going to lose this dog,” he thought.
He fought down the knowledge, getting a central line into Brownie’s jugular vein, sedating him with the strongest pain meds he had, and pulling blood for some basic tests. The dog’s kidneys were already starting to fail. Smith ached to debride the wounds, cutting away the dead flesh, but it was too soon; they’d have to wait for all the necrotic tissue to declare itself. Its stench stung the air, and Smith, with a human’s 5 million scent receptors, could only imagine the effect on an animal with 220 million.
For now, Brownie—a 3-year-old with a German shepherd’s tawny coat, a Labrador retriever’s profile, and an American pit bull terrier’s sturdy build—needed antibiotics and massive amounts of fluid. It had been at least 18 hours since his nerves screamed awake with a slosh of gasoline and instant, suffocating heat. Chained to the yard’s alley gate, he’d had no way to escape the flames. Now the destroyed nerve endings were firing continuously, multiplying his pain.
He held on for another 36 hours before he died.
Randy Grim, founder and director of Stray Rescue of St. Louis, got the news at dawn on July 12. Animal control and police officers had first brought Brownie to Stray Rescue. The staff vet climbed into the back of the truck, took one look, and said, “Get him out to VSS.”
Grim had planned to go to the specialty hospital first thing that morning and talk gently to Brownie, encourage him, tell him that he was loved. If the veterinarians thought Brownie’s recovery would cause him too much suffering, Grim would make the tough decision to euthanize him and stay until it was over. Instead, Brownie had died on his own, in the dark.
Grim sat on his couch, staring at nothing, hoping that at some point in Brownie’s three years, he’d felt cared for, safe, and free of fear.
OP—a dog that had been shot 12 times, strangled with an electrical cord, and tossed in a dumpster to die—nestled against Grim’s left side, chin on his thigh. Chill, who’d had both her back paws cut off, rested her head in his lap. “I saw his last meal,” Grim told them. “A panful of maggots with old spaghetti in it. And they had a chain on him heavy enough to tow a house. He never had a chance.”
The dogs pressed closer, Chill’s head jouncing as Grim sobbed.
When his tears dried, he got angry.
And this time, he had somebody to call.
Until last year, Brownie’s case would have ended with his death. “I knew a secret that no one else cared about,” Grim says. “St. Louis didn’t just have animal abuse—it was pandemic. And I could never get anyone to listen.” He gave the city circuit attorney’s office every scrap of information he could glean about every abused dog he rescued. (His nonprofit, which is privately funded, currently spends $2 million a year on emergency medical care.) But rarely was there enough hard evidence to prosecute.
Grim knew Mayor Francis Slay wanted to improve the city’s dismal record on animal care and control. Grim also knew he had an ally in Pam Walker, director of the city health department. But they needed help from law enforcement. So on February 29, 2012, he went to see St. Louis circuit attorney Jennifer Joyce.
“He was so frustrated,” Joyce recalls. “He kept trying to show us pictures—horrible, mutilated-dog pictures. I said, ‘Look, I understand. I’m on your side. I have three dogs. This lady is going to help you.’”
Assistant circuit attorney Anna Kratky gave Grim and his staff a precise checklist: “I need photographs. I need a veterinarian’s report. If you’ve got eyewitnesses, I need them to either come to the warrant application or write out a statement.”
Over the next few months, they made progress. But too often, Kratky says, “We’d get to a point in the investigation, and Randy had done everything he could, and we couldn’t issue the case. I’d say, ‘If that person had been arrested and Mirandized, maybe they would have made a statement. Or if we could have searched…’”
Jeff Rainford, the mayor’s chief of staff, joined Grim, Walker, and Kratky at a meeting in the boardroom of the Metropolitan Police Department. Out came Grim’s photos again: 100 of them, three months’ worth. Dogs beaten nearly to death, dogs starved until they were so weak they couldn’t eat solid food. “I meant to just lay them down,” he says, looking sheepish, “but I guess I was getting a little upset, and they went flying all over the table, dogs mangled and burned.” He left the meeting not sure whether everybody thought he was crazy.
On September 25, 2012, the mayor’s office announced the formation of St. Louis’ first Animal Cruelty Task Force. An energetic young St. Louis police officer, Lou Naes—Grim’s pick, because he’d shown such compassion in the past—would be dedicated full-time to investigating cases of suspected animal cruelty.
It was Naes whom Grim called the morning of Brownie’s death. They work as a team now, texting and phoning each other often. “He’s Batman to my Robin,” Grim says.
Naes was already investigating the case, and an arson specialist had examined the burned bush next to Brownie’s doghouse. “Gasoline was poured on him, and he was burning so bad that it caught the bush on fire,” Grim says. “It was raining, so that tells you how bad it was.”
Tips started coming in even before Grim taped “reward for information” flyers to telephone poles on the 4300 block of Cote Brilliante Avenue, where Brownie’s owner, Trena Block, lived with her children and boyfriend.
“People actually call our hotline now, which they would never have done five years ago,” he says. (Stray Rescue’s free spay-and-neuter programs, veterinary care, and classes are paying off, as is Grim’s regular presence in city neighborhoods. “Oh, you’re the dog guy,” people say now, more relieved than wary.)
This time, more than one of the callers said a member of Block’s family had done the burning.
Two weeks later, on July 25, Naes signed a probable cause statement for the arrest of Adrienne Martin, Block’s sister. He had a witness who’d identified Martin as the woman he’d seen standing, with a man, in the back yard of Block’s home late that night. According to the witness, she’d been holding a lighter, and he’d seen flames coming from a bush, the ground, and the dog tied to the fence. The witness claimed that when he approached, she and the man ran away.
Naes also had Facebook: According to his probable-cause statement, on July 9, the day before Brownie was found burned, Martin posted, “I’m on killa mode…..#killdogs.com…..today.” (She got six “likes.”) On July 10, she posted, “I mean what I say and I say what I mean….#alldogsdontgoheaven.com” (three likes). On July 14—after Block and her children appeared on TV news speaking fondly of Brownie—Martin posted to Facebook, “MF’s is killing me about this stupid dog….keep it real…you didn’t take care nor like or love the MF…on the TVstr8 lies …#laughingeveryday….stop bitch.” (five likes).
Naes wrote that he had reason to believe Martin had deliberately set the dog on fire and should be charged with two Class D felonies: animal abuse (which rises to a second-degree felony when it involves torturing or mutilating a living animal) and knowingly burning or exploding. He stated that when he interviewed Martin, she told him that Brownie bit her son the day before the fire, and her son had to go to the hospital. “The defendant originally denied any responsibility,” he wrote. “However, the defendant eventually admitted to me that she was responsible for the fire.”
Neither Martin nor her attorney returned calls for comment.
Crayoned cards and photos line Stray Rescue’s bulletin board, thank-yous for dogs that grew up hard but turned out to be the sweetest, most loyal, playful companions that a family could have. Stories like Brownie’s, though, are still hard for Grim to tell. A chained dog that’s probably got some pit bull in him and has bitten a child? “If you don’t live in the city and you don’t see it, you don’t understand.
“I don’t care what Brownie did,” he adds. “They created a monster. They don’t understand that. Being on a chain and miserable, not being cared for, not being loved, and being taunted by children is a recipe for disaster. And children not being supervised is another recipe for disaster. All of it was preventable. And they still don’t see the level of responsibility they have.”
Some St. Louisans don’t see cruelty to an animal as a crime, either, because until last year, it seldom had consequences. Grim read Martin’s attitude—whether she’s guilty or innocent— as “You’re locking me up for a damn dog?”
And so, on August 19, he walked into her bond-reduction hearing to make a statement. Nervous, he scanned the crowded courtroom: Word had gone out that Martin’s supporters would be there in force, and he knew firsthand how angry they were.
Martin’s attorney, Philip Dennis, stood before Associate Circuit Judge Theresa Counts Burke, asking her to reduce his client’s $50,000 bond. “Your honor, Adrienne Martin has not got a serious history,” Dennis said, adding that she works to support her six children and “has a lot of sisters and brothers and other people to make sure she will get back in court. In many cases, I believe these are misdemeanors. Usually, with these low-level felonies, a $50,000 bond…”
Kratky rose. Such incidents, she said, should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. She reiterated the charges and also mentioned Martin’s 2004 misdemeanor conviction—four counts of endangering the welfare of a child. (Her children had been left alone in a house that went up in flames.) Then Kratky introduced Grim.
“Adrienne Martin admitted to police that she set Brownie, her [sister’s] dog, on fire,” he began.
A tiny woman seated next to me, her eyes as bright and worried as a hungry bird’s, muttered, “She did not admit that to him. She did not confess anything.” This was Jackie Martin, Adrienne’s mother. She shuffled through an envelope of photographs, showing me a little boy’s calf, gashed open, and an angry red bite wound on the side of his face. “The dog bit this boy,” she said, waving one of the photos.
Grim kept going, saying Adrienne’s family had harassed him and his staff, made death threats, torn up their flyers, and shouted at people who’d come to Lafayette Square for the scattering of Brownie’s ashes. “I was boldly approached by Ms. Martin’s mother, who—”
“He pushed me!” Jackie said under her breath.
“It’s a fact that in homes where there is animal abuse, there is child abuse,” Grim continued.
“He is so wrong,” Jackie said, voice rising.
Kratky concluded: “As Mr. Grim stated, they have been threatened at their place of business… If anything, [the bond] should be increased.”
Dennis stepped closer to the bench, his silvering hair braided down the center of his back. “These individuals stood in front of her children and her nephews and nieces and called their mother and aunt all kinds of names, and they’re saying she’s harassing them?”
Burke asked him where this happened. “They didn’t go to the children’s home? This was at an event for the dog?”
Dennis acknowledged that to be true. “All I’m asking is that this woman be allowed to go to her house and be with her family. I’m asking that she be allowed to post a bond that’s reasonable.”
The judge gave a slight nod. “I’m going to deny your request, sir.”
Martin’s trial is set for November 18.
“You know what I found out?” Jackie Martin asks, welcoming me into her living room. “That wasn’t even a dog! It was a coyote!”
A voice calls from the other room, “It’s a mixed breed.”
“Come in here,” Jackie urges. Her daughter Kim Grgic—Adrienne’s and Trena’s sister—joins us. Jackie pulls up a Wikipedia entry for “coydog” on her phone. The dog pictured is longhaired, but a golden brown similar to Brownie’s.
Grgic is more concerned with Brownie’s record: She says he bit her son back on January 13, 2012.
She and Andy, then 5 years old, had gone to see Block, who then lived on Vine Grove Avenue. “I said, ‘Trena, where that crazy dog of yours at?’” The next thing Grgic knew, Mr. Ray (the name by which she knows Block’s boyfriend) was running down the steps yelling, “Brownie bit Andy.” They rushed the boy to SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center.
“I tried to do it the legal, professional way,” says Grgic. “I tried to sue her. My mother told me that that wouldn’t be possible, ’cause she didn’t have homeowner’s insurance.”
I ask whether she and Block are close. “She’s my sister! She said, ‘My dog will bite strangers.’ So what I took it as, we strangers? I can let my dog in the house. She’ll come up and lick on your face, but hurt and bloodshed? No.”
On cue, Grgic’s pit bull, Heaven, bounds into the room. Halfway into my lap, she licks my cheek, then rolls onto her back in hope of a belly rub. With the other hand, I page through paperwork that Jackie hands me.
Block was notified at Cardinal Glennon that she needed to call Animal Control, and she did so. Animal Control’s January 26, 2012, first-bite report indicates that Brownie had no rabies vaccination and states, “Child kept pulling on dog so dog bit him.” Grgic doesn’t believe it. She thinks Animal Control should have seized and euthanized the dog right then. “They try and put [Adrienne] away, and Animal Control didn’t do their job. And they make us the bad people. They said, if they would do this to a dog, the children going to be next. That was really cruel. We got 68 grandkids in our family, and ain’t no cases anywhere saying we physically hurt a child.”
Jackie says the child-endangerment case cited in court was a misunderstanding: “My house burned up, and they took the kids.”
“They can’t be looking all deep like that, usin’ stuff from that long ago,” Grgic says. “Let me tell you what happened to my dog Heaven’s sister that was vicious. The police shot the dog in the head. That was like two years ago.” Coco was her sister Keisa’s dog, she adds, and had been fighting a neighbor dog in Moline Acres. “Keisa’s was just the mean one.” I ask whether she thinks the shooting was justified. “Yep, it was justified, and they killed her.”
As for Brownie, she says, “Trena told them to take the dog. She didn’t know what to do with the dog.”
“That dog was untrainable,” Jackie inserts. “Now that we know it was a coyote…”
The door bangs. Andy, now 6, is home from Washington Montessori Elementary School. The smile fades from his rounded, already handsome face when his mother urges him to describe the day that Brownie bit Adrienne’s son Vernon. “I was on the porch, ’cause I was scared of the dog. We were going to get in the swimming pool. The dog had broke off the chain and started biting his butt.”
“Did it break off the chain, or did they go over there and mess with the dog?” Grgic interrupts. “Because the chain wasn’t broke.”
“He had let it off the chain,” Andy says.
She nods. “That’s the same cord they had when the dog was burnt up.”
“My Auntie Trena, she had taken him to the doctor,” Andy continues. “We all kept saying we was going to stab that dog. They said they wanted to kill him. We all grabbed something. I grabbed a screwdriver. I told Nini she should get that thing they cut the wood with.”
“A machete?” Grgic asks.
“Yeah! They locked him up in a car. It was going to die in there.” He shakes his head, rueful at 6. “Brownie had too many enemies.”
Jackie leans forward. “On the news, they acted like he was sleeping in that house,” she says, meaning Brownie in his plastic doghouse. “No. That dog used to have that house in pieces, one piece over here, one piece over there, and he was laying in the snow. So he wasn’t even acting like a real dog. Heaven gets in her doghouse.” (Grim says water puddled inside the doghouse: “I wouldn’t have slept in it either.”)
“Even the kids lied on the news,” Jackie continues. “‘The dog was playful.’ I said it was a Tasmanian devil. And now that we know that wasn’t even a real dog…”
So why did they keep Brownie?
“’Cause of Mr. Ray,” Grgic says, explaining that her sister’s boyfriend found a litter of pups in an abandoned building, picked out Brownie, and went back two weeks later when Brownie was old enough to take home. “He gave it gunpowder, gave it raw meat,” Jackie adds. She says when she objected to Brownie being aggressive to anyone outside his family, Mr. Ray told her, “It did what it was supposed to do.”
Animal Control records, obtained by SLM through Missouri’s Sunshine Law, show a second bite report for Brownie on June 8, 2012, then a second period of home confinement and a note: “Owner is taking dog to have euthanized.”
The third record is July 10, 2013: “Dog set on fire.” Animal control officer Frank DeManuele reported that when he arrived at 4:30 p.m., Block still had not taken the dog to a vet for treatment. “Dog was tethered by 2 cables that were tangled up and attached to a chain that was around dogs neck being used as a collar, that was attached by a lock,” he wrote. (The city’s ordinance on dogs and cats requires a 15-foot untangled tether with a swivel at both ends, attached to a nylon or leather collar, and no animal is to be tethered for 10 continuous hours or more.)
Walker can’t comment on Brownie’s case be-fore trial, but she says that once a dog has bitten, it can be surrendered to Animal Control and will be euthanized; there is a surrender fee of $60.
Block maintains that the officers wouldn’t take Brownie.
“I was calling around today to see if I could file charges against the Animal Control people,” she tells me. “They told me to go get the dog immunized, and if I wanted to get him euthanized, that was on me. [Ray] was telling me, ‘We can’t let the dog go because the dog will bite somebody and then come back to the yard. Since the man wouldn’t take him, we will go get the shot.’ I can barely afford to pay for the shots. I can’t afford to pay for the euthanasia.”
She’s silent for a moment. “When Brownie grew up, we didn’t have him around anybody but us. He didn’t let anybody, not even a little kid, get in the house. He was a good watchdog. He’d always bark when I got home, and I’d say, ‘Hey, Brownie,’ and he’d go woof, woof, and quiet down. Kind of like he greeted me.”
The night of the fire, Block says she heard Brownie barking at about 11:30 p.m. “I tapped on the window, and I was like, ‘Brownie! Shut up!’ He turned around and looked at me and settled down and went back in his doghouse. About 35 or 40 minutes later, he started barking again. It was raining, and he’s barking at the fence, so after about five minutes of telling him to shut up, I got back into bed and turned my TV up.”
The next morning, she says, the kids woke her at 8:30 or 9 to ask whether they could get in the pool. “Hold on, what did they do first? I think they had some cereal. Then at 10 or 11, they came and woke me up again, and I said, ‘Go ahead, get in the pool.’” (In a statement Block wrote for Animal Control, she said the kids went to a church summer program until a little after noon.) “I got in the shower,” she continues, “and they came and knocked on the door and said, ‘There’s something wrong with Brownie.’ So I went back there, and I looked at him. At first, he looked like he was in a dogfight. I walked around him and got a video of him. I took a film of the yard and the burned bush. Once I looked at that bush, I knew it was a fire. And then I went and called the police. They wanted to know why it took me until 2 o’clock to call them. I said, ‘When my kids said something was wrong with him, I was in the shower, and when I got out, I called you.’”
I ask whether Brownie seemed to be in any distress. Her tone changes. “He did. He looked like he was in pain. I fed him the night before—when I went in the house, I was like, ‘Oh, I forgot to feed Brownie,’ so I went out and fed him. Usually after I clean up, I give him whatever scraps are left over from the night before, which was his treat for keeping people out of the yard.
“He didn’t want to eat the food, but he was drinking water. I thought I’d better get him to stand up—’cause he was laying in the corner in the dirt—so I could get a better look at his wounds. After he drank the water, he went back and lay down in the dirt in the corner, and I waited and waited for the police.
“Ray was in jail at the time,” she says. “When I told him, he was like, ‘They made us keep the dog, and now somebody has messed the dog up.’ He was more upset that it had to go that far.”
Seven weeks after Brownie was burned, Zeus, a 3-year-old pit bull terrier, was found in Walnut Park East. He, too, had been severely burned. His owner surrendered him to the Humane Society of Missouri, and he was euthanized.
The problem’s not going away. Outcomes, though, are improving. A second detective, Luther Hall, has joined Naes on the St. Louis task force, because once he started educating other officers and city residents, his caseload exploded. In its first year, the task force has investigated more than 125 cases and made 27 arrests. With help from police, Stray Rescue, and the Humane Society (which has its own Animal Cruelty Task Force), the circuit attorney’s office was able to issue 15 misdemeanor cases and two felony cases—more than it had issued in the four previous years combined.
I ask Naes and Hall whether they’ve seen any patterns. Naes shrugs. “We see it on the north side, south side, west side, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, GED, college-educated.” He still has no idea why some people don’t quite see a dog as a living creature. “We talk about it every day.”
“You see everything from collars embedded in their neck to ears eaten away by flies,” Hall adds, marveling that so few of the dogs are mean.
“Except when chained,” Naes says. “If you take a young dog, a puppy, and never teach it any manners, and the only life it knows is on a chain, and all it wants is some kind of affection, and the only thing it can do is nip and bark, it’s not necessarily the dog’s fault. They tie them up next to alleys for protection, so they know when someone’s walking through. So people, when they have nothing else to do, antagonize the dog.”
I ask whether either of them has a dog.
“Pit bull, big teddy bear,” says Naes.
And Hall?
“I do. I have a dog.” He pauses.
What kind? Naes is grinning. “It’s ridiculous.”
Hall, a big, quiet guy who utters most sentences with deliberation, rushes through this one: “A toothless Pomeranian with anxiety issues.”
Naes takes pity on him and switches the subject, talking about how often dogs are used for street fighting or as burglar alarms. One dog was so intensely aggressive, Naes wondered whether he was sitting on some drugs. Sure enough, they found a pound and a half of marijuana buried right where he was tethered; he was circling the stash.
In simpler cases, when mistreatment is unintended, he thinks education can make a difference. “You talk to some of these owners about a problem, and they’re like, ‘What?’ The dog’s got open sores, and you say, ‘Well, sir, how are you going to correct that?’ ‘Oh, I’m gonna put motor oil on the dog.’ Which seems to be an old remedy. And you say, ‘Well, sir, I’m going to ask you not to do that.’”
And the felony cases? “There is no excuse,” Naes says. “To treat a dog like that and watch it slowly die? Something’s just missing.”
Are these future serial killers, inflicting suffering for their own pleasure? Naes shakes his head. The truth is even harder for him to understand. “I’d say 99.9 percent isn’t sadism. It’s ‘Whoops. Oh well.’ There is no regard.”
