Simply left behind

Stench of corpse from Viennese apartment: cat died

The cat must have waited by the door for days until someone came home.

(Bild: stock.adobe.com/mariesacha – stock.adobe.com)

A 43-year-old woman temporarily moved out of her completely littered apartment last July. But she simply left her four-legged friend behind. "The animal died in the most cruel way", the public prosecutor accuses. The woman's tears flow until the verdict: three months' conditional imprisonment.

"You can't even imagine that. She waited by the door for days for someone to come", says Judge Andreas Böhm in shock. In the middle of last July, the police were called to an apartment in Vienna-Liesing. The reason for the call: "smell of corpse".

Dead cat found by the front door
After the fire department opened the empty apartment, the officers were met with a shocking scene - piles upon piles of garbage. And next to it, behind the front door, a dead cat. "Apart from garbage, we found nothing she could have fed on," recalls an officer in the Vienna district. The animal had died in agony, without food or water.

"It was such an effort to go into the apartment"
The owner simply left the cat in the Messi apartment after temporarily moving out. "In the beginning I fed her anyway, but it was always such an effort to go there," cries the 43-year-old in the dock. She speaks of psychological problems that made it impossible for her to look after the four-legged friend - but she doesn't want to be specific.

The animal died in the cruellest of ways.

Die Staatsanwältin im Wiener Landl

When it comes to the pictures of her apartment during the animal cruelty trial, she sobs in a choked voice: "I don't want to see this." And lowers her head. The Viennese woman is also unable to look after her 16-year-old son properly. He now lives with her friend.

The condition of the unemployed woman also has a mitigating effect on the sentence. She receives a non-appealable three-month conditional prison sentence. "So that when you get your life back under control, the sentence won't appear on your character reference," explains Judge Böhm.