Decorius Mire (Beaumont Police Dept.)
A 24-year-old man in Texas will spend more than a year behind bars after he admitted to filming himself and another man abhorrently torturing a cat, including one of them kicking the animal like “a football field goal” before setting it on fire and posting the videos to social media. U.S. District Judge Marcia A. Crone on Monday ordered Decorius Mire to serve a sentence of 18 months in federal prison for his horrific conduct, authorities announced.
Mire reached a deal with federal prosecutors and pleaded guilty to one count of animal crushing. In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to drop a second animal-crushing count for which he had previously been indicted.
Under federal criminal law, animal crushing is defined as “actual conduct in which one or more living non-human mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians, is purposely crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled, or otherwise subjected to serious bodily injury.”
According to a criminal indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Mire and another man, Donaldvan Williams, were in Beaumont, Texas, when they encountered a “live domestic cat who was convulsing and foaming at the mouth as if having been poisoned.” Instead of rendering aid to the cat, Williams “kicked the cat as if kicking a football field goal,” prosecutors wrote.
“The kick propelled the cat through the air, a distance of approximately 15-20 feet,” the document states.
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Prior to Williams kicking the cat, Mire “encouraged and incited” him to do so and filmed the entire encounter and posted it to various social media sites. He kept the video up even after someone wrote in the comments section, “You need to delete this bro, you can go to jail for this video.” He also sent the video to individuals via direct message.
The already seemingly poisoned cat somehow survived the initial kick from Williams and was lying against a nearby curb. That is when Mire “aided, abetted, incited, counseled, and commanded” another unknown person to “soak[ ] the live, injured cat with an accelerant and set the cat on fire,” prosecutors wrote.
Mire made another video, this time filming the animal being set ablaze and “running while engulfed in flames, trying to escape the fire.” He posted that video to several social media platforms and sent it to various individuals via direct message as well.
Williams was also indicted by a federal grand jury in September 2022 on two counts of animal crushing under the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act. His case remains ongoing.
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