On Saturday, the Daily Freeman ran a story good enough to appear in a fine satirical publication like The Onion. The headline itself is a gem: "Cat wasn't burned alive, New Paltz police say."
As you may have guessed, this is a follow-up story to a story than ran in the paper two weeks ago, in which a New Paltz resident described how she had found a cat in her backyard that had "burned to death on a pile of wood:"
That woman, Linda Kennedy, offered a reward for information about the feline's killer, and spoke to the Freeman at length about her horror at the crime:
“Its claws were curled up really tight, so I knew that something traumatic and painful had happened to it,” she said. “That poor thing must have suffered.
But in fact, according to Saturday's follow-up story, the cat died of natural causes. It was then the beneficiary of an amateur's attempt at cremation:
“The cat was deceased prior to the cremation attempt of the pet,” [New Paltz Police Chief Joe] Snyder said. “What we found was that the person who owned it was very upset and attempted to bury it, but the ground was frozen, so they built a sort of funeral pyre.
“It’s not any cult activity or anything like that,” he said.
Kennedy, interviewed again by the Freeman, was quite relieved:
Police asked Kennedy if she wanted to press charges against the cat’s owner for trespassing on her property, but she declined.
“From what they told me, the owner was crying like a baby,” Kennedy said. “If he was crying, he must have had some kind of feelings.”
