MIAMI – Miami police arrested a 31-year-old woman Tuesday after they said she beat her Yorkshire terrier to death on the balcony of her Liberty City apartment and then threw its body in a dumpster.
Authorities said a concerned neighbor at the apartment building, located at 750 NW 69th St., captured the cruelty on video and reported it to police.
According to an arrest report, at around 9:30 p.m. on Nov. 29, a neighbor called police after recording the video of Lindsay Valcin beating the small dog.
Police said that video showed a “partially nude” Valcin punching the dog several times while saying, “You dumb b----.”
In the video, the dog could be heard “screeching” and “crying” during the attack, the report states.
According to police, Valcin “is then seen grabbing the dog by her tail and slamming her into the glass door on the balcony” and could be heard asking the dog, “Why the f--- would you do that?”
The video then shows Valcin grabbing the dog by her head and slamming it into the glass door several times, while saying, “You f---ing dumb b----,” the report states.
That, police said, would be the last words the defenseless dog would hear. By then, the report states, the Yorkie could no longer be heard crying; Valcin would throw the dog to the ground in the corner of the balcony.
The report states that in the video, Valcin then takes a red shopping cart and “ram(s) it into the dog’s body,” then picks up the lifeless dog and “slams her into the glass one last time.”
In the video, police said Valcin “continues to call the dog vulgar names and says, ‘Keep f---ing with my s---.’” and then says “If you f---ing die, oh well.”
“The dog is then observed on the opposite side of the balcony in a fetal position, silent and not moving, presumed to be deceased,” police wrote. “(Valcin) goes back inside her home and leaves the dog on the balcony.”
When police and a Miami-Dade Animal Services investigator spoke to Valcin, she first claimed the dog was with her mother and then, when her mother told police she didn’t have the dog, claimed it had been stolen, the report states.
The responding officer noted a red Sedanos shopping cart on Valcin’s balcony and wrote that while questioning her, she referred to the dog in the past tense, saying her dog “was a Yorkie mix.”
“When questioned about her choice of words, she stated it was a mistake,” the officer wrote. “Animal Services attempted to locate the dog in the trash chute but were unsuccessful in doing so. Due to lack of evidence, (Valcin) was not arrested at that time.”
MDAS returned to the property the next day and an investigator saw Valcin outside of the apartment building and, when she asked why the investigator was there, he replied that he was there to investigate an animal cruelty complaint.
Valcin, police said, “confirmed her identity to the investigator and told him her dog was stolen.”
“The investigator asked (Valcin) if the dog was in the trash chute, or the dumpster located on the property and (she) appeared to become nervous and walked away,” police wrote.
An investigator, after not being able to find the dog’s body in a bin connected to the building’s trash chute, later met with the property manager — who gave Valcin the dog as a gift — and reviewed CCTV footage, which showed Valcin tossing a black bag into a dumpster, police said.
According to police, investigators found the bag and the dog’s body.
“The dog was wrapped inside a gray baby blanket stuffed inside of the black bag along with other garbage,” police wrote. “The dog was deceased.”
A necropsy concluded the dog died from blunt force trauma by way of a skull fracture.
Police would bring Valcin in for questioning Tuesday. She told them, the report states, that on the night of the beating, she had come home after drinking and “realized that her dog damaged her sliding door, causing two holes to it.”
The rest of her statement was redacted from the report.
Police arrested Valcin on a felony charge of animal cruelty with intent to injure or kill.
“This is extreme violence to a helpless animal,” a prosecutor said when Valcin appeared in court Wednesday.
A judge, after giving her a $5,000 bond, ordered Valcin to have no contact with animals.