Last Wednesday animal networker Maria Sanchez, who constantly visits the San Bernardino City shelter in order to help their impounded animals find homes and rescue, was arrested by the cops who actually run the shelter. Her crime? Coming back to the shelter prior to the 72-hour “cooling off” period that was given to her after she was kicked off of the property days prior by Adam Affrunti. Why was she kicked off? Because she was repeatedly trying to bring attention to the poor health of a dog named Sue (#A462498) who was battling pneumonia and going untreated by the shelter. Maria asked numerous times that the dog be treated, was told that it was going to be, and then came to find out days later that it still hadn’t been. Sue is shown on video curled up on the concrete floor because her bed with a blanket on it was all wet after being placed directly under a leaking roof. Maria was begging them to treat Sue. That’s it. That was her initial crime. Then returning within the 72-hour window was her second crime. That’s it.

The code that the shelter staff/police used to kick Maria out of the facility was 9.12.030, subsections A and B. That is unfortunately the law in the city of San Bernardino. Is it an unconstitutional law? Of course it is! But the law does exist so they can clearly try to use it in order to harass and fluster visitors as they see fit. It reads “whenever there is reasonable cause to believe that such person has willfully disrupted conduct of activities.” Nice.

Some online have been hyper-critical of Maria and I’d like to add my 2 cents in her defense. Was she possibly mouthy in the moments of heightened contention? Yeah, probably. Was she resisting arrest? Yeah, technically. But what I saw while viewing the main video was a cop who repeatedly put their hands on her and then immediately went to handcuff her when she pulled away. After they took her phone she was trying to maintain her physical position inside of the facility in order to get her phone back, or be able to view that it was going to be given to her friend instead of kept.

Going way further, let’s take many, many steps back. I can relate to Maria Sanchez because she does similar things in relation to trying to advocate on behalf of a certain shelter’s impounded dogs. She’s there, day after day, to help the dogs gain exposure that will hopefully lead to their safety, as well as to shed light on the system that would much rather kill them. She knows the dogs. She cares for the dogs. She’s invested physically, mentally and emotionally. She sees what she has the power to do for them, and should, by any stretch of the imagination, be viewed as an asset to the shelter. They instead choose to view her as the enemy.

So, in the midst of something completely absurd and ridiculous such as this happening, along with the suffering of Sue, who she was holding and trying to get help for, she was definitely agitated and emotionally distraught. Can you blame her? I wasn’t there, and had that been happening to me there’s no telling how I would have reacted. Also, some people just aren’t going to systematically roll over to a police officer who is on a power trip, and clearly the officer who was standing alongside Affrunti was on a power trip. Not to mention how they were contorting her arms and dragging her, holding her against walls. I also understand how others could say that Maria should have just left, waited the 3 days and then came back. But she didn’t, she made a different choice and I respect her for it.

In the days following Maria’s arrest the shelter has retaliated in the form of killing groups of different dogs that were being networked, and while they’ve had upwards of 30-40 kennels sitting empty. Their oppressive tactics against Maria and others have been mentioned on my website before. They are now trying to say that Maria “assaulted a peace officer,” after the cop tripped over her feet while dragging her outside. This is the type of cowardice bull that’s trying to rewrite the history of what happened. And all of this complete nonsense is because a woman goes to the shelter to photograph their dogs, hoping to save their lives.

The above video shows some of the public comments from Monday’s San Bernardino City Council meeting. Steve Miller, you brought me to tears when talking about the dogs. Thank you for saying what you said, man. It is incredibly important. Marla Tauscher’s comment was also hugely powerful and posed questions and scenarios that absolutely need to be addressed. I wish I could have been there. The community standing up for themselves is always a good thing, no matter what the issue is. Keep doing it. At the end you will see that the Mayor says something to the affect of “we’ve heard enough about the animal stuff,” as he is attempting to shut down public comments. His microphone was still live and it was picked up on the video feed. Below are 2 television reports, from KCAL and KTLA respectively, that attempt to bring further attention to the happenings.