The landlord of a two-apartment house in the 1900 block of Lancaster Ave. called 911 after the upstairs tenant heard glass break and suspected an intruder was in the vacant downstairs.
Officer Rusty Reed, Humphrey and his partner Cpl. Erik Meese responded, finding the first floor had a broken back window. The upstairs tenant let them into the building and the officers jimmied the downstairs apartment’s locked door.
“Whoever left the apartment left personal belongings, an old mattress, clothes everywhere, left-over food that never got thrown away, garbage. There were roaches and fleas everywhere,” Humphrey said, and there were empty heroin bags. “It was disgusting.”
Then they started finding kittens, a total of five scattered around, all dead, and no sign of their mother. “It was a pretty disturbing sight, especially if you’re an animal lover,” he said.
The officers were about to leave, Humphrey said, “and as I was turning around I heard a little kitten just meow.”
The hunt was on. “We were just looking, looking, looking and couldn’t find it,” he said. They looked through the scattered clothes, under furnishings, “searching and searching ... hunting through rubbish and moving everything.”
Then there was another sound. “If he didn’t chirp, we wouldn’t have found him,” Humphrey said. “Finally, we found this little guy sitting behind a door next to a shoe ... hidden away.
“He was smaller than the dead kittens, way underweight and just covered with fleas,” he said.
As Officer Reed called the Delaware SPCA to start a cruelty investigation, Humphrey put the kitten into a laundry basket with some clothes and drove straight to Faithful Friends Animal Society.
The kitten, thought to be 3 or 4 weeks old, was in extremely critical condition, said Jane Pierantozzi, executive director of the nonprofit, no-kill shelter in Germay Industrial Park near Elsmere.
“We started getting the fleas off him right away,” she said, and put him on a heating pad to bring up his “deathly low” temperature.
“His lips and tongue were white,” Pierantozzi said, “but we took him to Longwood [Veterinary Center in Kennett Square, Pa.] and they saved his life with a blood transfusion.”
A Longwood vet tech took him home for around-the-clock care and, by Friday, he was in a Faithful Friends foster home – eating and playful.
When the kitten, called “Little Humphrey” for his rescuer, reaches 3 pounds or about 12 weeks, he can be neutered, have his rabies inoculation and go up for adoption.
“Thanks to Officer Humphrey,” Pierantozzi said. “He’s a hero.... We’re very proud of him and the Wilmington Police Department for this.”
Humphrey said he did what any officer would.
And if he didn’t have “a house full,” he said he would adopt the kitten.
But he, his son 8-year-old Daniel Jr. and girlfriend, New Castle County Paramedic Julianne Santora have two rescued cats, McLovin’ and Twilight, a rescued Chihuahua named Lily, a cockatiel named Bird and his canine partner, Sky.
All Humphrey wants now “is for Little Humphrey to get adopted and have a good home.”
And one other thing, he said: “I’m not the hero here. Faithful Friends is the hero.”
(Delaware Online - Sept 22, 2013)
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