Teen charged with animal abuse in dog's death

A Sedalia teenager was charged with stealing and animal abuse after he allegedly killed a neighbor’s dog.

Cody C. Paxton, 17, of the 300 block of East Boonville Street, faces charges of stealing, a class C felony, and animal abuse, a class D felony. He was in Pettis County Jail Friday afternoon in lieu of $10,000 bond.

Paxton is accused of depriving the dog’s owner of his property by killing it, so he was charged with stealing, according to court documents.

Paxton admitted to shooting the sheltie-mixed dog with a shot gun while it was in a kennel Thursday morning, officers stated in the documents. Paxton gave conflicting statements to police, first saying it was an accident and later saying he didn’t even see the dog, wrote Patrolman Sean Hiatt in his probable cause statement.

The neighbor told officers that Paxton come to his home and said someone was shooting at him in a nearby alley, Hiatt reported. The man invited Paxton inside and offered to call the police. Paxton declined, telling the neighbor that he also had a gun.

Paxton went home and the neighbor discovered the wounded dog. Officers said Paxton first told them that he was in his backyard and heard what he thought was a gunshot so he went inside his home.

“Based on the discrepancies between (the neighbor’s) story and Cody’s story, most notable Cody’s initial failure to mention to me that he had been shot at minute earlier, I believed that Cody was attempting to mislead me regarding his behavior,” Hiatt wrote in his statement.

Later, Paxton’s father allowed police to look around the home where they found a shotgun with a spent round in the chamber and smelled as if it had been recently fired. Officers also found a spent round in a trash can in Paxton’s room and in a wooded area behind the home, court documents stated.