Dogs: A Tragic and True Saga of Hoarding and Colossal Government Failure Exacerbated by a Complete Collapse of Governmental Oversight in Downeast Maine

Description

Predominantly set in Jonesboro, in the part of Maine the natives call Downeast, Dogs - A Tragic and True Saga of Hoarding and Colossal Government Failure Exacerbated by a Complete Collapse of Governmental Oversight in Downeast Maine is a saga that chronicles the extreme state of lawlessness and the gross dereliction of duty by the powers that were in 2001 and 2002 mostly as it pertains to up to 28 dogs. It’s the story of John H. Hughes Jr., who was born and mostly reared in Brooklyn, New York. Hughes graduated from fine Catholic schools where mostly Mercy Nuns at Saint Jerome School and Xaverian Brothers at Nazareth High School maintained nothing but the highest standards of academic and behavioral excellence. Hughes was an active card-carrying member of the iconic Flatbush Boys Club where among other things he was a Boy Scout who attained the rank of Star, the third highest. Apparently, the result of a life changing traumatic brain injury (TBI) Hughes received as a teenager, something changed in early adulthood, and not for the better. Hughes started a freefall that would culminate in him leaving Florida, where he lived most of his adult life, in an old motorhome with a hoard of dogs and a cache of 37 guns. His destination was Downeast Maine. Hughes wandered aimlessly around Washington County in Downeast Maine, living in poverty and extreme squalor, and skipping meals so he could buy food for his brood of dogs. The motorhome was so laden with dog urine and feces that it leaked out from the sides of the vehicle. Hughes was moved along by the police dozens of times—reportedly 35 times—but they never intervened in a meaningful way. Not once. When the dogs had apparently ripped out and chewed through a lot of the motorhome’s interior wiring, disabling the vehicle, Hughes is forced to settle on 3.48 acres, more or less, of heavily wooded land in a very remote area which lacked all utilities. He let the dogs loose and they began roaming at large in packs where daily, from sunrise to sunset and beyond, neighborhood people were housebound or at grave risk and wildlife was being chased, wounded, and killed. It continued for 81 continuous hellish days with government doing next to nothing to stop it despite desperate pleas to do something. The Town of Jonesboro allowed Hughes to live in a mobile home that was, according to Maine Revised Statues, a clearly defined dangerous building. That building would be where he died in a fire in late November 2002. Less than a week later his remaining dogs, seven at the time, were massacred, which was ordered by a high-ranking state official when a very botched plan to euthanize them failed miserably. The dogs were shot to death with a .45 caliber handgun by a state humane agent, and when he was overcome with emotion and unable to continue a civilian finished the job. The dogs were buried side-by-side in a mass grave with a backhoe in the very place they died. But the extreme state of lawlessness and the gross dereliction of duty by the powers that were didn’t happen by happenstance in Jonesboro, it was, by all accounts, by design—a well-orchestrated approach advocated by the longtime town clerk of Jonesboro, who seemed fearful of John Hughes to an inhuman like extreme. Her husband and one of her bosses, a selectman in the Town of Jonesboro, failed to provide much needed oversight. The animal control officer (ACO) for the Town of Jonesboro, also so fearful of Hughes she refused to do much of anything about his dogs, the know everything but do nearly nothing town constable for the Town of Jonesboro, and three State of Maine officials who failed to act for months and when they did, they botched it. It was dereliction of duty at its worst. The approximately 20-month saga involved colossal government failure exacerbated by a complete collapse of government oversight that was so bad readers will think it’s fiction, but we have the evidence that proves it’s not.