The Savage Beating Meted Out to a Volunteer in Los Angeles by a Racist Hooligan Vividly Demonstrates Just How Dangerous It Has Become to Feed Homeless Cats

 Ian Justin Eulian Kept Fit by Beating Up a Woman

"It doesn't matter what career you have up until that point, you're going to have to be held responsible for that type of conduct."
-- Joshua Elliott Ritter, prosecuting attorney for the County of Los Angeles

The widely known and heavily financed national groups may get all the ink and glory but it is those kindhearted volunteers who care for homeless cats who always have been the heart, soul, and backbone of the feline protection movement. In the past, the most that their compassion was likely to cost them were time, labor, and money.

All of that has changed now and even so much as daring to feed a homeless cat can land an individual in jail, the hospital, and even the morgue. (See Cat Defender post of May 16, 2019 entitled "An Orlando Woman is Unfairly Arrested and Jailed for Defending Her Right to Feed Homeless Cats and as a Consequence Those Under Her Care Have Been Left to the Mercy of the Cold-Blooded Killers at Orange County Animal Services.")

Just how precarious such acts of compassion have become of late is perhaps nowhere more vividly demonstrated than in the brutal beating that thirty-nine-year-old Ian Justin Eulian of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) doled out to forty-seven-year-old Rebecca Stafford shortly after midnight on September 14, 2013. She was busily putting out kibble in the 2500 block of West View Street in Los Angeles in an effort to trap a cat when Eulian, who was off-duty at the time, ran up to her and yelled for her to stop.

Angry words were exchanged that culminated in Eulian's vowing to kill all the homeless cats in the West Adams neighborhood. She responded by throwing kibble in his ugly mug and he retaliated by leaping off his feet and delivering a series of hard punches to her face.

She then fled for her life into her Jeep but before she was able to start the engine and make her getaway, Eulian reached inside her vehicle and dragged her out where he delivered two additional punches to her face. While all of that was going on his seventy-year-old mother, Lionetta Fontaine, intervened by slapping Stafford in the face.

The savage beating inflicted upon her left Stafford lying unconscious on the pavement and bleeding from the back of her head. It is unclear exactly how long that she was out cold but once she came to she was suffering from temporary amnesia.

Her loss of memory afforded the opportunistic Eulian and Fontaine with what that they thought at the time was a sure-fire way of getting away scot-free with their violent crime. So, when Stafford asked them what had happened they concocted the outrageous lie that she had accidentally slipped and struck her head against the side of her car.

Since she was hardly in any position to refute what they had told her, that also provided the partners in crime with an opportunity to act magnanimously. They did so by having Fontaine graciously volunteer to drive Stafford home in her Jeep while Eulian followed behind in his tin lizzie.

When she went to the hospital the following day Stafford was diagnosed to have sustained a black eye, an injured left jaw, cuts inside her cheek, and a pair of swollen lips. All that was in addition to a concussion.

Even though that was bad enough in its own right, it is doubtful that even then she had any earthly idea of just how lucky she was to still be alive. As a fitness freak and, in all probability, a body builder, Eulian is a powerful man and he easily could have killed her with any one of the powerful blows that he delivered to her unsuspecting and unprotected face.

For example, he once as a contestant in a contest sponsored by Men's Health magazine to name "America's Fittest Firefighters." (See the Daily Mail, July 2, 2015, "Man Who Once Tried to Be 'America's Fittest Firefighter' Jailed for Assaulting Cat Lady Who Wouldn't Stop Feeding Stray Felines.")

Now armed with more than sufficient evidence in order to cast serious doubt on Eulian and Fontaine's version of events, Stafford next took her suspicions to the Los Angeles Police and, fortunately, the entire assault had been captured on surveillance cameras mounted outside the nearby West Adams Community Center. Eulian eventually was arrested and charged with one count of felony assault as well as one count of felony battery. He remained as free as a bird, however, on a US$20,000 bond.

Rebecca Stafford Was Beaten Senseless by Macho Man Eulian

Inexplicably, Fontaine never was charged with anything even though she was her son's accomplice, conspired with him, and obstructed justice. Eulian's arrest did serve nevertheless to put a lid on his and Fontaine's high-fiving and pretenses of being slick. Instead, they were exposed as nothing more than cat-haters, thugs, liars and, above all, criminals.

The incident additionally unmasked them as hard-core racists. West Adams, for instance, is 37.6 per cent black and 56.2 per cent Latino but only 2.4 per cent white and some blacks resent honky-donkeys being in their neighborhoods and that is especially the case if they happen to be feeding homeless cats.

Ailurophobia is toxic enough in its own right but whenever it is combined with racism it become dynamite. (See Cat Defender posts of July 30, 2009 and May 1, 2010 entitled, respectively, "Ferals Living at a Baltimore Church Find Out the Hard Way That Hatred of Cats Is Every Bit as Christian as Unleavened Bread and Cheap Wine" and "When It Comes to Cats, Acts of Faith Count for Absolutely Nothing With the Good Christians at Northside Baptist.")

As is the case with many disputes of this nature, the events of September 14, 2013 were the culmination of a long-simmering dispute. Specifically, Eulian had complained in the past that the cats Stafford was feeding were using his garden as a toilet and that they had attacked his mother's blind dog.

Since cats are not in the habit of attacking dogs, Eulian is quite obviously lying about that. While it is entirely possible that they could have been fouling his garden that, too, is highly questionable.

First of all, cats normally stay away from both dogs and individuals who are openly hostile to them. Secondly, it is a sure bet that neither Eulian nor Fontaine were either sheltering or feeding them unless they were putting out poison for them to ingest. The cats therefore did not have any valid reason for venturing onto such violent turf unless Eulian and Fontaine had not been properly disposing of their garbage.

Despite the incontrovertible evidence supplied by the surveillance footage, Eulian's first trial in 2014 ended in a hung jury. At that juncture it sure looked like he was going to beat the rap and he likely would have done just that if anyone other than Joshua Elliott Ritter had been trying the case, People v Ian Eulian, for the County of Los Angeles.

It was a terribly long time in coming but judgment day finally arrived for Eulian on May 21, 2015 when a jury in Los Angeles took less than two hours in order to convict him of both felony assault and battery. Since he had been angling for yet still another mistrial and thereby to eventually exhaust both the prosecution's money and patience, defense attorney Robert A. Schwartz was anything but gracious in defeat.

"This was a farce. One hour, really, of deliberations?" he stormed to the Los Angeles Times on May 21, 2015. (See "Firefighter Is 'Crushed' after Being Convicted of Assault, Attorney Says.") "If a jury does their (sic) job and they (sic) reach a verdict, I can live with that. But when they (sic) just go through the motions, I do have a problem."

He quite obviously has never heard of either an open and shut case or his towering ego will not allow him to admit even to himself that Ritter kicked his rotten ass. Once he had calmed down a little bit, however, he decided to try his hand at improvising a little fiction.

"Ian is crushed by the verdict," he bellyached to the Los Angeles Times. "He's a kind, thoughtful person. He's done good all his life. He's never been violent before."

According to psychologists, an individual's character is formed early on in life and, if that is true, a thirty-nine-year-old man does not just suddenly out of the blue beat a middle-aged woman half to death and threaten to kill defenseless cats. It therefore is all but certain that if an exhaustive investigation ever were made into Eulian's past it would expose him to be an extremely violent man who has physically assaulted numerous individuals, cats, and other animals in the past.

Eulian Eventually Was Forced to Face the Music in Court

At his sentencing on June 30, 2015, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Jose I. Sandoval gave him one-hundred-eighty days in jail, placed him on probation for three years, ordered him to perform twenty-five days of community service with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and to attend one-year of anger management classes. Even though he not only richly deserved but could have been sentenced to serve seven years in jail, Eulian was anything but grateful for the extreme leniency shown him by Sandoval.

"I've never led my life to even be in a situation like this, so to say I'm catching a break it's hard to say that when I never saw myself in jail or in court or arrested," he complained to the Daily Mail in the article cited supra. "My record has been extremely clean for thirty-nine-years."

As everyone should know, there is a huge difference between being a law-abiding citizen and never having been caught. Perhaps Eulian simply had been either too slick or lucky in the past for the authorities to have apprehended him.

Before judgment was passed on him, he did belatedly apologize to Stafford. "I'm sorry," he reportedly told her according to KCAL-TV of Los Angeles on June 30, 2015. (See "Former Firefighter Sentenced for Assaulting Cat-Feeding Lady.") "I've lost everything -- my reputation, my career. Please allow me the chance to continue to provide for my family."

Although there can be little doubt that he deeply regrets being forced to resign from the LAFD and thus having to forfeit his high salary and all the benefits that went along with it, the only thing that he truly was "sorry" about was getting caught red-handed on camera. Even if he had killed Stafford it is highly unlikely that he would have shed so much as a solitary tear.

"He really allowed his temper to get away from him to a shocking extent," Ritter summed up to KTLA-TV of Los Angeles on June 30, 2015. (See "Los Angeles Firefighter Sentenced in Caught-on-Camera Beating of Woman Feeding Cats.") "It doesn't matter what career you have up until that point, you're going to have to be held responsible for that type of conduct."

That was far from being the end of this case, however, in that Eulian remained free on bail while he appealed his conviction to California's Second District Court of Appeal, Division Five, and it was not until June 7th of the following year that it finally got around to rendering its decision. In a unanimous twenty-eight-page opinion authored by Justice Sandy R. Kriegler that was joined by Justices Paul Turner and Lamar W. Baker, the court rejected Eulian's appeal and affirmed his conviction.

"The critical issue in this trial was whether defendant used a reasonable amount of force in self-defense or defense of his mother," Kriegler stated. "The jury could rationally conclude that defendant provoked the conflict, and that he continued to be the aggressor until Stafford responded, at which point defendant knocked her out with a series of punches."

Even in ruling as such, Kriegler had some choice words for Stafford. "We do not suggest Stafford was blameless in this incident," he concluded. "It would be generous to say that her conduct left much to be desired."

By way of response, Stafford told My News L.A. on June 7, 2016 that the biggest problem that she had with the entire affair was "getting blamed for things that I didn't do." (See "Ex-Firefighter 'Lost Everything' in Conviction for Hitting Cat-Feeding Woman: Now He Loses Appeal.")

She also acknowledged on that occasion that ever since the attack she had been afraid to even so much as to go shopping at the neighborhood market. Press reports have not broached the subject but such an admission raises the possibility that either Eulian or some of his friends and relatives may have attempted to intimidate her from seeing this matter through to its logical conclusion.

Although Eulian certainly could have appealed his latest legal setback to the California Supreme Court in San Francisco, no record of such an appeal is to be found online. That does not necessarily mean, however, that he actually ever did serve the six months in the slammer that Sandoval meted out to him.

It would be heartening nevertheless if that indeed turned out to have been the case. Perhaps he was even forced into serving as what in jailhouse lingo is known as an "asshole buddy" to some drug kingpin. It would be even more just if he accordingly had come out of jail suffering from either Hepatitis C or AIDS.

These  Kittens Used Their Wings to Flee the Ghetto...

Deplorably, American society is chock-full of individuals just like him. They pretty themselves up and brown-nose those with the money and power in order to get on in this outrageously uncivil and corrupt society while simultaneously abusing and killing cats as well as beating up women whenever they think that no one is watching. The world and all of its treasures belong to the phonies, posers, hypocrites and, above all, criminals.

It has not proven possible to ascertain the fate of the cats that were under Stafford's care but given that she was scared to death to so much as go to the market it seems likely that she was forced into abandoning them. As a consequence, every one of them is likely long dead by this time but countless others have sans doute since then been abandoned in the neighborhood and they, too, are destined to face the same deprivations, violence, and cruel fate as their predecessors.

Unlike their English counterparts who do not hesitate to rescue cats that become stranded in trees, on electrical lines, and at other heights, American firefighters generally refuse to intervene in such emergencies and that raises the specter that most of them are every bit as virulent cat-haters as Eulian. Even if it ultimately should turn out that laziness, as opposed to ailurophobia, is the north star that guides their behavior, they nevertheless are another group of professionals whose conduct bears close monitoring. (See Cat Defender posts of February 20, 2007, March 20, 2008, and November 9, 2017 entitled, respectively, "A Stray Cat Ignominiously Named Stinky Is Rescued from a Rooftop by Good Samaritans After the Fire Department Refuses to Help," "Bone-Lazy, Mendacious Firefighters Are Costing the Lives of Both Cats and Humans by Refusing to Do Their Duty," and "Forest Is Rescued from High Atop a Dead Cherry Tree in an Exceedingly Rare Display of Ailurophilia on the Part of an American Firefighter," plus, the Telegram and Gazette of Worcester, February 24, 2018, "Massachusetts Firefighter Reprimanded over Handling of Cat Call.")

Overall, the black community's mistreatment, neglect, and abuse of cats can only be described as criminal. First of all, since so many of their neighborhoods are racked with gun violence some of it surely must spill over and onto cats.

Secondly, the vicious dogs that many blacks own surely must chew up countless cats. Thirdly, adolescents from these neighborhoods abuse and kill cats with impunity. (See Cat Defender post of October 5, 2006 entitled "New Jersey Teens' Idea of Fun: Beat Up a Defenseless Kitten and Then Burn It to Death.")

Even countless black adults fail to provide their resident felines with shelter, suitable food, and veterinary care. (See Cat Defender posts of December 23, 2010 and October 13, 2016 entitled, respectively, "Tavia's Desperate Pleas for Help Fall Upon the Deaf Ears of the Evangelical Who Abandoned Her and the Heartless Officials and Citizens of Kissimmee" and "Bart Has Courageously Overcome Being Run Down by a Hit-and-Run Motorist and Subsequently Buried Alive by His Owner but Another Dark Cloud Is Hanging over His Future.")

Furthermore, the black community's utter contempt for the sanctity of all animal life extends far beyond cats. For instance, throughout her long career Aretha Franklin shamelessly strutted around stage in an array of large furs that no doubt had to be specially manufactured in order to fit around her grotesquely obese frame.

It accordingly was not surprising last week when more than one-hundred-fifty black religious leaders rallied outside of City Hall in Manhattan in opposition to a proposed bill that would ban the sale of fur throughout New York City's five boroughs. (See the New York Post, May 14, 2015, "'Runway' Star Gunning for Fur.")

Perhaps most telling of all, the nation's first black president, Barack Obama, cared absolutely nothing for cats and other animals. (See Cat Defender post of November 23, 2017 entitled "For Eight Long and Tortuous Years, Barack Obama and His Bloodthirsty Henchmen Within the Federal Bureaucracy Waged a Ruthless, No-Holds-Barred War on Cats.")

That is by no means meant to imply that feline abuse and neglect is a dirty secret that pertains only to the black community; au contraire, just about all minority and insular communities are guilty of the same types of crimes. For example, Mormon fundamentalists have little or no regard for feline and canine lives. (See Cat Defender post of August 8, 2012 entitled "Polygamists Condemn Thomas to a Long and Excruciatingly Painful Death by Burying Him Up to His Tiny Neck Inside a Steel Post Filled with Wet Concrete.")

In their own countries, the Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Indians slaughter cats by the multitudes for the dinner table and, rightly or wrongly, the rumors persist that those living in this country do likewise. Even if they are no longer killing and eating them, their wholesale exploitation, abuse, and neglect of them is still reprehensible.

Jews in Israel mistreat cats horribly under the best of circumstances but when they pulled out of the Sinai in 1982 and Gaza in 2005 they cruelly left behind thousands of them in order to fend for themselves. (See Cat Defender posts of August 10, 2006, October 12, 2006, and August 9, 2007 entitled, respectively, "The Death Toll Mounts for Cats and Other Animals Slaughtered and Left Homeless in Lebanon by the Israeli War Criminals," "A Few Hundred Cats and Dogs Are Airlifted Out of Lebanon but Cluster Bombs and an Oil Slick Continue to Kill Animals and Marine Life," and "The Israeli Police Turn a Blind Eye to the Poisoning of Fifty-Three Cats and Dogs in Kiryat Tivon.")

Members of their Orthodox and Hasidic communities scattered throughout the United States sacrifice tens of thousands of chickens each Yom Kippur in a ceremony known as kaparot and while not much is written concerning how that they treat their cats it is nevertheless strongly suspected that they, too, suffer from horrible neglect and abuse. After all, the same people who bequeathed to posterity Genesis 1: 26-28 and Acts 10: 11-13 fervently believe that their god has endowed them an unqualified right to do with all animals as they see fit.

...but There Is Little Hope for This Homeless Cat in West Adams

Owing to the dereliction of the capitalist media, little or nothing is reported concerning how that the Amish and Native Americans treat cats but the strong suspicion is that both groups horribly abuse, neglect, and nakedly exploit them. For example, the latter's killing of whales is repulsive enough in its own right. (See Cat Defender post of June 18, 2007 entitled "Alaskan Eskimos Bomb and Butcher a One-Hundred-Fifteen-Year-Old Bowhead with the Complicity of the United States, the IWC, and Sea Shepherd.")

The media likewise almost totally ignores the Hispanic community's crimes against the species with the notable exception of once in a blue moon naming some of its members who kill and eat cats. (See Cat Defender posts of September 13, 2007 and December 1, 2008 entitled, respectively, "Costa Rican Bull Rider Bites Off the Heads of Live Cats, Dogs, and Other Animals, Drinks Their Blood, and Then Eats Their Flesh" and "Peruvians Ludicrously Claim That as the Descendants of Slaves They Are Entitled to Massacre and Eat Cats with Impunity.")

To be fair about the matter it also must be acknowledged that the Swiss, Italians, and diabolical Australians also eat cats. (See Cat Defender posts of February 5, 2007, September 7, 2007, and November 18, 2016 entitled, respectively, "Fur Traffickers and Vivisectors Are Suspected in the Disappearance of Berlin's Katzen," "Australians Renounce Civilization and Revert to Savages with the Introduction of a Grotesque Plan to Get Rid of Cats by Eating Them," and "A Clever Devil at the University of Adelaide Boasts That He Has Discovered the Achilles' Heel of Cats with His Invention of Robotic Grooming Traps as the Thoroughly Evil Australians' All-Out War Against the Species Enters Its Final Stages.")

There are always multiple exceptions to all rules but it nevertheless is difficult to get around the overpowering impression that most minorities do not care for cats. For instance, they do not practice spay and neuter or even provide those that they own with proper shelter and halfway decent commercial food.

Perhaps even more revealing, it is almost unheard of to see minorities in veterinary clinics. The situation could be somewhat different in densely populated urban areas but not all that much.

Responsible and compassionate cat care and ownership therefore tends to be the almost exclusive preserve of middle and upper class whites but even amongst them it is not all that widespread. That dichotomy between groups is not due to financial and social considerations either in that many minorities not only have money but enough of it to burn.

While there certainly is not any legal requirement that minorities even so much as like cats, they nonetheless should be required to abide by the strictures of the anti-cruelty statutes like everybody else. They additionally should be held accountable under the law for abandoning cats.

Since society has so completely failed to protect those cats that, through no fault of their own, are trapped in minority neighborhoods, their lives are invariably, to borrow from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, nasty, brutish, and short. Even if against all odds they are somehow able to eke out a meager existence for a while, sooner or later Animal Control officers intervene and put an end to their lives.

Needless to say, any society that makes even the slightest pretenses about being just and humane owes them considerably more than trips to the gallows. As things now stand, however, it appears that most individuals have fallen under the sway of PETA, ornithologists, and wildlife biologists and accordingly subscribe to the abhorrent notion that the only good cat is a dead one.

With that being the case it is truly lamentable that all kittens and cats who suffer the outrageous misfortune of finding themselves in ghettos, shtetls, and similar hellholes do not enter this world equipped with wings as was the case with Mrs. Jane Tabby's litter of Thelma, James, Theodore, and Harriet in Ursula Kroeber Le Guin's 1988 inspirational little tome, Catwings. They then would be able to fly away to the countryside and thus be free of cat-hating racist hooligans such as Eulian, gun violence, motorists, vicious dogs, large hungry rats, and cruel people who hide behind religion in order to commit their evil deeds as well as all the rubbish and squalor that characterizes these miserable communities.

Since that is not a feasible solution to their god-awful plight, the next best palliative would be TNR but considering the beating that was doled out to Stafford few individuals and groups are willing to put their lives on the line by venturing into these hostile and often racist and violent neighborhoods. Perhaps groups of four or five volunteers could be prevailed upon to enter these communities during daylight hours but even that is a long shot.

Yet, as things now stand the sad truth of the matter is that these forgotten cats are beyond the reach of all morality and law and that must not be allowed to continue. It thus seems clear that they must, somehow and some way, be humanely trapped and physically removed from these hellholes and relocated to either existing TNR colonies or placed in good homes.

Photos: the Daily Mail (Eulian and Stafford), Al Seib of the Los Angeles Times (Eulian in court), Scholastic Press (Catwings' book jacket), and KTLA-TV (a homeless cat in West Adams).