10 July—Good news today. On Monday, almost two years after his arrest in June 2022, an animal abuser and killer in Connecticut was actually sentenced to do hard time. That may not seem like much, but it is Connecticut after all, where animal abusers and killers normally get away with warnings, piddling fines, and meaningless slaps on their guilty wrists.

The abuser this time was David Rivera, a 36-year-old (now-former) New Canaan canine cop who ran a side business in Naugatuck training dogs for law-enforcement agencies. Problem was that he shot more than a dozen mature dogs and puppies that he and his alleged manager-accomplice, Daniel Luna, considered to be untrainable.

According to court documents, Rivera and Luna shot the innocent dogs in the head while they (the dogs) were eating and then buried the victims on the premises.

Rivera was sentenced in Waterbury Superior Court for first-degree malicious wounding/killing of an animal—a felony—to five years, suspended after two served, followed by three years probation. According to reports, Luna also was arrested, but his case is supposed to be pending, although we couldn’t find any reference to it on the state Judicial Branch website.

In a separate, but related, case, Rivera had been arrested a month earlier, in May 2022, for reckless endangerment for illegally storing explosives, some of which had begun to degrade and crystallize, at his death kennel and home. Presumably the explosives had been used to train explosive-sniffing dogs, but you never know. Rivera was sentenced to 364 days (the maximum) for that first-degree misdemeanor.

Unfortunately, the explosives sentence is to be served concurrently with the one for canicide and no fines were amerced. There appears to have been some plea bargaining involved, because Rivera had been arrested at his home in Stratford a month before his arrest in Naugatuck and charged in Bridgeport with possession of explosives and illegal purchase and receipt of a long gun, both felonies. You wonder if Rivera would have been sentenced to any jail time at all had he not been nabbed for the gun offense.

But the bugger’s two-year sentence is better than nothing. And you wonder how a former cop will make out in the slammer . . .