It was a ruff end to this pet custody battle.
A Brooklyn woman is having her two dogs taken away from her after she brought the pooches to Long Beach and passed out in the sand last year.
Owner Debra Connolly unleashed her fury on the judge who declared she was incapable of providing proper care for pets Mary Alice and Henry, comparing him and her former dog walker now caring for the pups to “Satan.”
“The judge was biased against me, I believe, because he’s Jewish and I’m Catholic,” Connolly told The Post in a phone interview — still fuming after losing her battle to get the canines back.
“I’m out of work and I live on social security disability,” said Connolly, who lives in supportive housing on the Upper West Side. “All I do is pace, drink water and go to Dunkin Donuts all day. This is very hard — I’m devastated.”
Connolly, 60, had claimed in her initial court filing that her “former pet sitter” was trying to “extort” her for possession of the two dogs, one of which has severe medical problems, including creeping blindness.
The judge, who appears to be the borough’s arbiter of doggie justice, compared the two dogs’ lifestyles with the feuding fur-parents and ordered the dogs to not be returned, ruling that Connolly’s ability to care for them was “questionable.”
The dogs in dispute — Henry, a 5-year-old Chihuahua, and Mary Alice, a 12-year-old tan puggle, who suffers eye conditions and spine issues from her formerly abusive owners.
“My dogs are in grave danger … She doesn’t show tender loving care, she only cares about money,” Connolly wrote in a handwritten declaration to the court.
“And if the older dog is dead,” she wrote, “I want her ashes.”
The doggone debate began last October when Connolly took the dogs to Long Beach, where she slept overnight on the sand while en route to her sister’s house in Rockville Center, she said.
When she awoke, Connolly said she discovered that her pocketbook — and Henry — were missing.
Long Beach animal control had retrieved the dog and returned him to the name listed on his microchip — a professional dog caretaker who Connolly had worked with for the last four years to help watch her dogs.
The caretaker had apparently watched the dog’s during their owner’s frequent hospitalizations — one of which lasted 56 days.
Later, Connolly says the Long Beach police “ripped Mary Alice out of my arms,” and also delivered her to the dog walker.
“Mary Alice is my soulmate. I love her so much,” she said. “I saved her life. We had a beautiful life together.”
The dog walker and caretaker, Brooklyn-based Venessa Nina, refused to return the dogs, arguing that she had a claim to ownership and that returning them to Connolly would make her liable for animal abuse prosecution because of the owner’s inability to care for the pups.
Nina did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Connolly filed a pro-se lawsuit seeking their return last spring, arguing that as the legal owner — since she adopted them five years ago, the dogs should be returned to her care.
“I proved my case on the first hearing,” she said. “I had the chips, I had the licenses, I had the veterinary records, and yet he kept dragging this out.”
Judge Aaron Maslow wrote that the dogs’ welfare mattered more than whatever sympathy the court might have for the plaintiff, “who predictably will sustain an emotional loss from being cut off permanently” from the dogs.
Maslow relied on a “best for all concerned” approach, which weighs the animal’s well-being alongside the more literal question of possessory rights
Connolly, who says she used to work at JP Morgan and Citi Bank, adopted and licensed the dogs in 2019, rescuing Mary Alice days before she was set to be euthanized in a Brooklyn shelter, she told The Post.
According to court documents, Nina also claimed to have the dogs licensed at some point, leading Maslow to state that both had a claim.
Nina, in one of the three hearings held over the summer, had told the court that at Connolly’s former Brooklyn apartment, she “observed unsanitary conditions with the floor covered in blankets with urine and feces,” and that when she took custody of the dogs last October, they needed two baths to get clean.
She also cited Connelly’s repeated hospitalizations as “raising serious concerns” about her ability to care for the animals.
Maslow said that while Connelly supplied numerous letters in her support from friends, her health team and a clinician who all described her “ love and dedication to her pets as unquestionable.”
But the judge ultimately questioned Connelly’s ability to care for the pooches.
“The court will not subject [pooches] Mary Alice and Henry to a filthy, urine and feces-laden household,” wrote Maslow in his decision on Oct. 15, He also denied any shared custody or even visitation rights “due to the hostility observed between the parties, principally by [Connolly].”
Connolly said her former Brooklyn apartment wasn’t covered in “urine and feces.”
“It was our home, it was cozy,” adding that sometimes Henry went to the bathroom in a crate because he wasn’t house broken. “He just believed whatever she said.”
Maslow cited photos from Nina of the dogs with people in her Brooklyn neighborhood and playing with large dogs at the dog park.
“The dogs appear content,” he wrote. “Quite evidently, under Defendant’s aegis, Henry has flowered into a social butterfly.”
Still, Connolly said she will file a pro-se appeal, since she cannot afford a lawyer, and will continue to fight for her dogs.
“I’m going to really fight to get my dogs back,” she said. “I can’t afford a lawyer — there are no lawyers for the animals.”
