Getting all weepy isn't often a good idea in a place known for gang activity and murders, but it hasn't been easy for 11-year-old Cesar Rojas to hide his feelings concerning the little kitten he found nearly burned to death.
He turns his head when visitors ask about the kitten he and a friend found cowering in the bushes June 19 after two older girls allegedly set it on fire.
"It was barely breathing when we got it," he said, his voice scarcely audible. "It wanted to live."
Cesar saved the kitten's life when he picked it out of the bushes and brought it to the apartment manager, who contacted Forgotten Felines of Sonoma County, which took the injured animal to a veterinarian. It was an act of compassion that has been all but ignored amid the widespread outrage generated by the alleged cruelty of two 15-year-old girls.
The girls, whose names have not been released, were charged in Sonoma County Juvenile Court with felony cruelty to animals on Tuesday after they were identified by witnesses as the ones who burned the kitten.
Good for Cesar Rojas, and the outpouring of compassion for the poor kitten is good to see. It's strange that girls did this sort of thing, but it looks like they're going to get three years in juvy to think about it. Perhaps someone will douse them with a flammable liquid while they're locked in their cage. That would be just terrible, really.
Some folks are a mite skeptical about the sympathy.
It is a surreal situation for the mostly Latino residents of the Papago Apartments, who point out that there was no reward and not much concern around the Bay Area when a teenager was slain in the complex last summer. Jose Ayala Ramirez, 16, was shot in the head Aug. 19, 2006, in what Santa Rosa police said was a gang-related shooting that has yet to be solved.
"People are angry and it was wrong, but it bothers me that they're doing so much for the cats and when a person gets killed they just let it pass," said Arturo Mendosa, 20, echoing what many others in the complex are saying. "It makes me angry that they're doing more for animals than for us."
Edgar Palominos, 14, said his brother was a good friend of the slain teen.
"If they really wanted to find the guy who killed him, they would have put up a reward like they did for the cat," he said.
Yes and no. On the one hand, the sheer degree of helplessness of the animal in this instance no doubt prompted much of the outrage. And torturing animals is where most of these sociopaths get their start, before they up the ante to human prey. So maybe there's some preventive maintenance going on here.
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