A Florida Woman Is Arrested and Sent to Jail after She Goes Berserk and Throws Her Lover's Cat, Stanley, into the Intracoastal Waterway

Stanley Became the Victim of a Lovers' Spat

"...she demanded to be taken to jail so she could make a phone call, bond out and kill her ex-boyfriend."
-- the Volusia County Sheriff's Office

Fifty-three-year-old Christa Anne Thistle is a big and powerfully-built woman who looks like she could play middle linebacker for the Green Bay Packers. She also has a vile temper and is prone to violence.

The details are rather shaky but for an undetermined period of time she had been living with an unidentified man in her RV at the Riverwood Park Campground in Oak Hill, forty-three kilometers south of Daytona Beach on the banks of the three-thousand-mile-long Intracoastal Waterway. Not only is that facility open year-round, but it offers campers such much needed amenities as restrooms, hot showers, and a laundry.

For an undisclosed reason, that relationship went up in smoke early on the evening of August 19th when she ordered her boyfriend to vacate her RV. When he failed to have shaken a leg as quickly as she would have liked, she took matters into her own hands by tossing out his belongings and upturning some food that he was preparing for dinner.

If she had had the bon sens to have stopped there, the outside world likely never would have known that she even so much as existed. Thistle, however, is anything but either a rational or a law-abiding woman.

So, in her rage to get back at her boyfriend, she grabbed the cage containing his brown and white cat, Stanley, and hurled it into the Intracoastal Waterway. That woman who in Hughie Cannon's 1902 Dixieland classic tossed out Bill Bailey with "nothing but a fine-tooth comb" has not got anything on her.

Not about to stand idly by while his beloved companion drowned, the man promptly jumped into the waist-deep water and pulled Stanley to shore. Although the attack had left him soaking wet, shivering, and no doubt frightened to death, he came away from that terrible ordeal unharmed.

Nevertheless, he had been submerged for about twenty seconds and most assuredly would have drowned if it had not been for the heroics of his faithful owner. He now hopefully understands that the welcome mat that the campground keeps out for cats only applies to management and not necessarily to all campers, especially wild and violent women. 

Either her boyfriend or another camper then notified the Volusia County Sheriff's Office in Deland, fifty-nine kilometers west of Oak Hill, but when the deputies arrived on the scene Thistle vehemently denied throwing Stanley into the drink. Based upon the readily observable facts that he was soaking wet and his owner was wet up to his waist, the deputies wisely believed the boyfriend's version of events and arrested Thistle and charged her with animal cruelty. (See the New York Post, August 23, 2021, "Florida Woman Throws Cat into River During Fight with Ex-Boyfriend: Cops.")

Unwilling to let bad enough alone, she continued to shoot off her mouth and that in turn served only to land her in even more trouble. She thus was additionally charged with simple assault after "she demanded to be taken to jail so she could make a phone call, bond out and kill her ex-boyfriend," the Volusia County Sheriff's Office announced the following morning on its Facebook page. 

Christa Ann Thistle Is a Violent Woman

Always willing to accommodate deserving members of the public, the deputies honored her request by treating her to a free ride to the Volusia County Branch Jail in Daytona Beach where her bail was set at US$5,000. Since no additional press reports regarding this matter have appeared online, it is not known how quickly that she was able to have made bail.

Some good did come out of that exercise, however, in that the time she was forced to spend cooling her heels as a guest of the county did allow her to calm down a bit because, as far as it is known, her boyfriend is still being counted among the living. 

This episode does, however, highlight the utter travesty of the animal protection laws in this country. For instance, if she had not made that threat against her boyfriend's life, the most that she would have received for attempting to drown Stanley would likely have been a desk appearance ticket. In other words, human life counts for everything but the life of a cat counts for little or nothing.

If the boyfriend should fail to testify against her in court, Thistle will in all probability walk. In an attempt to make sure that does not happen, Lady Freethinker of Santa Monica has started an online petition imploring R.J. Larizza, the state attorney for the Seventh Judicial Circuit which includes the counties of Volusia, Flagler, Putnam, and St. Johns, to prosecute her to the fullest extent of the law. (See Lady Freethinker, September 18, 2021, "Justice for Cat Trapped in Crate and Thrown into River.")

The only thing positive that can be said in her defense is that her behavior appears to have been a spur of the moment aberration brought on by eros whereas just about all other drowning cases involving cats are acts of premeditation. (See Cat Defender posts of January 13, 2006, May 20, 2008, August 9, 2010, September 27, 2010, March 25, 2011, and July 9, 2014 entitled, respectively, "Montana Firefighters Rescue a 'Lucky' Calico Cat Who Was Caged and Purposefully Thrown into an Icy River," "Malice Aforethought: An Upstate New York Cat Is Saved from a Watery Grave by a Dead Tree and a Passerby; a New Hampshire Cat Is Not Nearly So Fortunate," "Sunday Afternoon Boaters Pluck Splat Out of Clouter Creek after She Is Thrown Off the Mark Clark Expressway Bridge in Charleston," "Caged, Shot Thirty Times with an Air Gun and Then Tossed into the Bay to Drown, Lovey Is Rescued in the Middle of the Night by a Good Samaritan," "Compassionate Construction Workers Interrupt Their Busy Day in Order to Rescue Chabot-Matrix from a Stream in Maine," and "Dumped in the Normans Kill, Chance Did Not Have a Prayer in Hell Until a Jogger Who Had Turned Off the Music Heard His Plaintive Cries for Help.")

The same is most definitely true of those cats that are dumped on bridges. (See Cat Defender posts of July 6, 2009 and August 12, 2010 entitled, respectively, "Miracle Survives a Drowning Attempt on the McClugage Bridge an Later Hitchhikes a Ride to Safety Underneath the Car of a Compassionate Motorist" and "Gia and Mr. T. Survive Separate Attempts Made on Their Lives after They Are Abandoned on Busy Bridges During Inclement Weather.")

The one thing that the majority of those cats share in common with Stanley is that they were all caged before being tossed into the water. Although the owners of Splat, Chabot-Matrix, Miracle, Gia, and Mr. T. elected not to confine them, that only means that they were too cheap and lazy to have gone to the trouble of purchasing cages.

Neither the cops nor animal protection groups ever bothered to so much as to look into any of those cases and, considering the high level of corruption that exists throughout the judiciary, it would not have made much difference anyway. For example, when Laurence E. Thayer of Brookfield, Massachusetts, and Donald Curtis Hunt of Norge, Virginia, were caught redhanded drowning kittens they were not punished. (See Cat Defender posts of July 3, 2006, October 23, 2007, and May 14, 2009 entitled, respectively, "Crooked Massachusetts Cops Allow an Elderly Politician to Get Away with Attempting to Drown a Kitten Named Lucky Girl" "Virginia Does It Again!: A Farmer Who Drowned at Least Five Cats Gets Off with a Slap-on-the-Wrists," and "Virginia Is for Cat Killers, Not Lovers, Now That Its Legal Establishment Has Sanctioned Donald Curtis Hunt's Drowning of Five Kittens.")

As for Stanley, he was taken to Volusia County Animal Services in Daytona Beach as a precautionary measure. Presumably he has now been reunited with his owner but the dust-up with Thistle has left them, at least temporarily, without a place to call home.

Christa Anne Thistle Is Handcuffed and Led Off to the Pokey

No reason has been advanced as to what precipitated Thistle's violent outburst against her boyfriend, but it is always possible that she was jealous of the time and devotion that he was lavishing on Stanley. On the other hand, he could have been merely a convenient bystander that she singled out as the object of her spleen. 

While it is conceivable that they could have patched things up by now and be back together, such a lovey-dovey arrangement does not augur well for Stanley's safety and continued good health. The boyfriend accordingly would be a bloody fool if he were to ever again allow Thistle anywhere near Stanley.

It is one thing for lovers to fight tooth and nail but once either party commences attacking the other's cat it is time to end the relationship. Moreover, it is risky business for cat owners to hook up with partners who do not like members of the species.

Although it is overwhelmingly men, such as Joseph Petcka and Declan Garrity, who assault their girlfriends' feline companions, Thistle's assault upon Stanley is living proof that at least some women are more than capable of the same abhorrent behavior. (See the New York Daily News, September 28, 2008, "Cat-Killer Joseph Petcka Treated Me Like an Animal -- Ex-Girlfriend," the New York Post, December 18, 2009, "Cat-Killer Petcka Sentence (sic) to Community Service," the New York Daily News, February 26, 2016, "Cat-Torturing Goon Tricked Pet's Owner into Thinking He Was 'Best Roommate Ever' while Sadistically Burning, Beating Animal for Three Months," and the Belfast Telegraph, March 3, 2016, "New York Cops Rearrest Northern Ireland Man Accused of Cat Torture after He Ignores Ruling by Judge.")

Most perplexing of all, it is difficult to fathom what any mature man would ever want with a woman. First of all, there is the dilemma of finding a suitable partner and that immediately eliminates all youngbloods; they are cemetery bait.

Secondly, there is he problem of desirability. "Someone asked (an elderly) Sophocles: 'How is your sex life now? Are you still able to have a woman?' " Plato relates in Book I of The Republic. "He replied: 'Hush, man. Most gladly am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped a mad and savage master'."

Thirdly, there is the fear of being driven so mad by eros as to commit unjust acts. "When one is doing evil 'tis madness to stop halfway," archdeacon Claude Frollo, who resorted to all sorts of criminalities in his futile attempt to win the heart of the provocative Esmeralda, lamented in Victor Hugo's 1831 novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "The extremity of guilt has its delirium of rapture."

Fourthly, keeping a cat is undeniably cheaper, less bothersome, and considerably less exhausting than doing likewise with a woman. (See Cat Defender post of February 17, 2018 entitled "Forget about Women! Adopting a Cat Is a Far More Rewarding Alternative for Some Guys Who Are Searching for Their Forever Valentines.")

Of course, it is an entirely different matter for young bucks who simply must have what only a woman can provide. Nevertheless, even if contrary to all reason Stanley's love and companionship is not enough for the boyfriend and he still insists upon having a woman, he surely can do better than the rough and tumble Thistle.

Photos: Volusia County Sheriff's Office.