A Missouri man was sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading guilty to animal abuse charges, according to local reports.
Andrew Nipper, of Cape Girardeau, was accused of stabbing a dog to death before leaving its remains at the owner’s doorstep.
The incident occurred in May of this year. Biggerstaff responded to a knock on her door to find her dog inside a trash bag.
Police searched Nipper’s vehicle and home and found trash bags similar to the one the dog was placed in.
Police also found black hairs that were similar to the dog’s hair in his vehicle, the SE Missourian reported.
Biggerstaff also told officials that Nipper, who was her ex-boyfriend, killed the animal, the paper reported.
She also claimed he had been stalking her and alleged that he tried to hit her with his car.
The Star reported that Nipper had previously pleaded guilty to a fourth-degree assault charge and was placed on supervised probation. He also pleaded guilty to stealing in a separate case.
Local reports did not indicate what type of breed the dog was.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
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