The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption

25

REBECCA HUSS HAD BEEN working nonstop for nearly two straight months, eight weeks of stress and anxiety. She had been to Virginia twice, and on each trip she’d made the rounds to every shelter to see every dog. She’d also created the application for rescue groups and when groups signed up to take the dogs, she’d checked all their references, doing research on each. She had long conversations with the principals, probing their backgrounds and figuring out exactly how many dogs they could take on and if they had the capacity to deal with special-needs cases.

She also consulted with the USDA about the final measures of the agreement each group would have to sign. She’d spent hours on the phone with experts learning about the needs of pit bulls in general and about dogs with the sort of checkered background these particular ones had. She pushed for regulations that would assure the best care for the dogs and safeguard the public against any mishaps.

She persuaded the USDA to soften the requirement that each group must have been in existence for at least three years, as long as the people running the group had spent at least that much time doing rescue work. She also convinced the agriculture department to relax the nondisclosure clause from a lifetime gag order to one that would last only as long as the case was still open.

Throughout she cross-referenced what she learned about each rescue group with what she knew about each dog. Which ones would match up the best?

Finally, in early December, she sat down and wrote it all out. After the two dogs that had been euthanized, one because it was violent and Rose because of her illness, there were forty-seven left. Two months had passed since the initial evaluations, enough time for some of the dogs to have changed, and Huss now had feedback from Rattay’s and WARL’s extended work with the dogs, so she tweaked the original recommendations: Eighteen were deemed Sanctuary 1; seven Sanctuary 2; twenty-two Foster; and none were suggested for Law Enforcement.

Of the twenty-five sanctuary dogs, twenty-one of them were ticketed for Best Friends. Two would go to Recycled Love in Baltimore and one would go to BAD RAP. Of the twenty-two foster dogs, the nine that had gone to BAD RAP would stay there, as would the three that had already been placed with SPCA for Monterey. Four would go to the Richmond Animal League, two to the Georgia SPCA, one to Recycled Love, one to the Animal Rescue of Tidewater, one to Best Friends, and one to Our Pack.

She recommended that groups that took a foster dog receive $5,000 per dog, and groups with sanctuary dogs get $20,000 per dog, all of that money coming from the funds supplied by Vick. Whether that was enough money or too much would depend on how long the dog lived and what sort of care it needed over the course of its life, but everyone involved agreed to the amounts and the money was put in escrow accounts, where it would sit until needed.

The document was submitted to the court on December 4. She waited. Everyone waited. Two days later the motion was approved.

Every one of the remaining forty-seven dogs would get a chance. They would go to places where the mission of the people around them would be to help them recover and rehabilitate, teaching them that despite their previous experiences, the world was not such a bad place.

When Donna Reynolds and Tim Racer got the call, they screamed and danced in their kitchen. They had been working for a moment like this for years. Now they had to make sure the dogs lived up to their part of the deal. If they did, it would be a chance to tell the other side of the pit bull story, the side no one wanted to hear before. But first, Tim Racer had something else to do. He got on the phone with his travel agency and then started packing a bag.

The circus had returned to Richmond. It was December 10 and once again there were people with signs and homemade T-shirts lining the streets around the federal courthouse. Some were Michael Vick supporters, waving posters that said KEEP THE FAITH, but many more were animal lovers and citizens deeply offended by Michael Vick’s actions.

Nicole Rattay arrived early, before daylight, and took her place in the line that was already beginning to form. She was sure that just as they had during the summer, courthouse officials would shunt overflow onlookers into auxiliary rooms where they could watch the proceedings on closed-circuit TV. Rattay wanted to make sure she got a seat in the courtroom.

Tim Racer had planned to meet Rattay in the early morning but his flight was delayed and he ended up in one of the overflow rooms. Rattay, however, made it into the courtroom. Many of the seats were taken up by Vick’s friends and family, and as Rattay entered, Vick’s brother, Marcus, had his arm around their mother, comforting her as she wept. Looking around she saw Jim Knorr and Bill Brinkman. She also saw Gerald Poindexter.

In September, five months after the original raid, Poindexter had in fact brought state charges against the members of Bad Newz Kennels, slapping each of them with two counts of animal cruelty. The trial was scheduled to take place in spring. Vick faced another five years on those charges, but before he even thought about that he had to get through today’s federal sentencing.

It would not be easy. The plea deal Vick signed called for a prison term between twelve and eighteen months. Vick’s lawyers were asking for the lower end of that, citing Vick’s public apology, his participation in an animal cruelty sensitivity class, and his otherwise clean record despite having grown up in a crime-ridden neighborhood.

In the previous weeks two of Vick’s co-conspirators had gone before the judge, and the results were not comforting for the Vick team. On November 30 Purnell Peace got an eighteen-month sentence and Quanis Phillips, Vick’s childhood friend, got twenty-one months. As the symbolic if not actual leader of the group, Vick was in a worse position than either of them.

Plus, Vick had other problems. In the two months since pleading guilty he had failed a drug test, testing positive for marijuana, which was a violation of his plea agreement. Afterward, Vick claimed he had smoked to deal with emotional pain after his father had given several critical interviews in the media.

About the same time, in interviews with federal agents, Vick had also failed a polygraph, contradicting his original confession. He had maintained from the start that he’d never had a hand in killing any of the dogs, but when he maintained those claims in these latest inquests the lie detector had called him out. He was forced to backtrack and admit that he had participated, with his own two hands, in eliminating poor-performing fighters.

If all that was weighing on Vick, it wasn’t obvious as he entered the courtroom. Wearing the black-and-white-striped prison garb he’d been issued when he turned himself in, Vick smiled and spoke with people in the room. Once the hearing began, he stood between his two attorneys, listening intently as the proceeding advanced and when given a chance to speak he offered another apology. He said that he’d used “poor judgment” and added, “I’m willing to deal with the consequences and accept responsibility for my actions.”

Judge Hudson was not impressed. “I’m not convinced you’ve fully accepted responsibility,” he said. Hudson explained that the failed drug test and lying in his original testimony undercut his claims of remorse and his pleas for leniency. “You were instrumental in promoting, funding and facilitating this cruel and inhumane sporting activity.”

The judge continued: “You need to apologize to the millions of young people who looked up to you.”

“Yes, sir,” Vick answered.

Then Hudson handed down the sentence-twenty-three months. The harshest term of the bunch. On the same day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution estimated that Vick had incurred about $142 million in monetary losses. Taken together, the jail time and the financial loss represented a tremendous fall for an athlete who had once been viewed as a crossover star and the future of his sport.

A week later, Tony Taylor, the former Bad Newz member who had provided key evidence to the prosecution, received a two-month sentence. Not everyone was happy. Some felt Vick was punished too severely, some thought the sentence not nearly harsh enough. Mike Gill and Jim Knorr and Bill Brinkman were satisfied.

The result of all their efforts led to the biggest dogfighting conviction ever, one that set new precedents. It was the first time that dogs in a fight bust were looked at not as weapons, as the equivalent of a gun in a shooting, but as victims. It was also the first time that they were looked at individually, instead of being considered as a group. The bad guys were going to jail; the dogs were getting another chance.

Brinkman had been a key figure in the outcome, from his role in the original raid, to his recruitment of the federal government, to his chasing down of a wide range of leads and linking many disparate strains of evidence together. Now, with the work behind him and the verdict in hand, Brinkman received an odd reward. Two weeks after the Vick sentencing, Brinkman was let go by the Surry County Sheriff’s Department, which he said told him only that it “was going in a different direction.”

Surry County Sheriff Harold Brown told one reporter that Brinkman’s part in the Vick investigation had been a factor in his dismissal, although Poindexter later denied that was true. Still, it was hard not to think about what Brinkman had said the first day he stepped on Vick’s property: “This investigation is probably going to get me fired.”

Brinkman took a philosophical attitude about the way things turned out, trying to keep sight of the greater good. Since the case ended, a few people had left injured dogs in his yard. His truck had started acting up, and when he took it in to be serviced, the mechanic told him the brakes had been tampered with. He had married recently, and he was beginning to feel unsafe in Surry County. It was a good time to get out. Still, he said, knowing how everything turned out, he would do it all again.