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Article Archive > Middletown baby geese killer pleads guilty, will undergo psychotherapy Middletown baby geese killer pleads guilty, will undergo psychotherapy MIDDLETOWN - A Municipal Court judge stopped just short of sending a township man to the Monmouth County Jail after he pleaded guilty today to beating three baby geese to death with an umbrella. Michael Gonzalez, 30, was given a six-month jail term, but Middletown Municipal Court Judge Michael D. Pugliese suspended that sentence after being assured that Gonzalez would be undergoing a year of psychotherapy. Gonzalez also was fined $4,100, placed on a year's probation and banned from owning any animals for five years. Pugliese said the suspended jail sentence means any deviation from the order to receive psychiatric treatment or the terms of his probation will result in his being incarcerated for the six-month term. Gonzalez said little during the Municipal Court proceedings, with most of the factual basis for the animal cruelty admission being laid out by his attorney, Steven E. Nelson of Neptune. Gonzalez was charged May 16 with beating the three goslings to death after he lured them away from their parents and into a wooded area, said Victor "Buddy" Amato, chief of police for the Monmouth County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The slain goslings were young enough that they still had their yellow downy feathers, Amato said. Necropsies performed on the animals at the Red Bank Animal Hospital determined they had died of blunt force injuries that had broken their bones and damaged their internal organs. "He stalked these little animals," Amato said. "It was a heartbreaking case. When I went to photograph the crime scene the parents were laying next to their dead babies. It was like they couldn't understand what had happened." The sentencing comes on the heels of another animal cruelty plea, entered last week, officials said. In that case, David Lench, 50, of Swatrzel Drive was fined $1,000 after he admitted to animal cruelty. He had been accused of trying to poison his neighbor's dog with mothballs, Amato said. The dog's owner, Michael Flynn, said he had seen Lench putting something by the fence that separated their property lines and later found his German Shepherd pup with mothballs in its mouth. The dog was unharmed, Flynn said.
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