I write about dogs for a living, through my newsletter I Love Every Dog, but I could not stop reading about what investigators found inside a home in Alvarado, Texas, last month, and I do not think this case should be allowed to fade quietly.
Alvarado police executed a search warrant at a home on West Jessup Street and found conditions so severe that investigators needed specialized protective equipment just to process the scene. Inside, they found 64 live cats and 6 live dogs still surviving, alongside the remains of 69 dead cats and other deceased animals. Two people who lived at the home, Michael Stephen Morton, 39, and Lisa Faye Griggs, 38, were arrested on animal cruelty charges. The surviving animals are now being cared for through Alvarado Animal Control and Operation Kindness.
Sixty-nine dead cats in one home is not neglect that happened over a bad week. It is a slow-motion collapse that someone allowed to continue for a long time while dozens of other animals kept living in that same house. The investigation is still open, and Johnson County District Attorney Timothy Good's office has not yet said publicly what charges it intends to formally pursue.
I am asking District Attorney Timothy Good to bring the full weight of Texas's animal cruelty statutes against both defendants, to seek charges that reflect each individual animal harmed rather than a single blanket count, and to request a lifetime ban on both Michael Morton and Lisa Griggs ever owning or living with animals again. Johnson County's animal control and rescue partners are absorbing the cost of this case right now. The least the county can do in return is make sure the prosecution matches the scale of what was found in that house.
