District Attorney Rick Healy said Christine Mulcahy (Christina Mulcahy), 23, pleaded guilty Sept. 25 to two counts of misdemeanor animal cruelty. She will be sentenced Nov. 16 to no more than 16 months in jail.
A trial in the case had been scheduled for this week in town court.
Mulcahy was charged in June after county deputies were looking into the report of a missing adult in Palmyra and found the body of a horse that starved to death on abandoned property on Lyon Road. A second dead horse was found nearby.
Mulcahy, who owned the horses, turned herself in after a county grand jury indicted her for cruelty to animals. Police said they stumbled on the first dead horse in a barn and subsequent tests at Cornell University’s forensics lab determined the animal had starved.
Investigators found the decaying carcass of the second horse in an open field several hundred yards from the barn. They determined it had died months earlier.
Authorities found a third horse owned by Mulcahy, alive, at a stable south of Rochester where she was boarding it. Deputies seized that horse, which at one time Mulcahy was caring for in Palmyra, as evidence.
Deputies said the surviving horse was checked by a veterinarian and found to be malnourished due to a lack of food and water for an extended period of time.
Healy said as part of the guilty plea, Mulcahy will have to pay restitution for care — boarding and veterinary expenses — of the surviving horse.
This is not the first time Mulcahy has been charged with abusing animals.
Records show Mulcahy and Kyle Jopson were arrested in 2012 for Cruelty to a Animal after a dog was found to be emaciated at the same Palmyra address. In that case Jopson pled guilty. Charges against Mulcahy were dropped after she had promised to give up the six horses found on the property at the time who ere also reported to be underfed.
(FL Times - Oct 16, 2014)
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