"North Ridgeville humane officer Barry Accorti has a penchant for blasting helpless animals in front of people."
That's how we began an article almost exactly two years ago about Accorti, a former lieutenant with the North Ridgeville police department who spent 31 years on the force before retiring and being hired as a humane officer. And it's still a fitting intro today because Accorti's tenure as a humane officer has been anything but humane and he's finally been fired because yes, he had a penchant for blasting/killing helpless animals in front of people.
Back in 2013 Accorti drew widespread criticism after showing up to a house where a feral cat and five kittens were found in a woodpile and subsequently telling the homeowner that the animal shelters were full and the kitties were "going to kitty heaven." He then shot all the cats, in front of the homeowner.
Accorti somehow kept his job but ended up back in the news and on the receiving end of calls for his job in 2014 when he responded to a call of a trapped baby raccoon and proceeded to shoot it in front of three 10-year-old children.
Again, Accorti kept his job, but he couldn't stop indiscriminately killing animals in particularly vicious and public ways, like on Tuesday afternoon when a man from Texas who was visiting his girlfriend in North Ridgeville called the police after accidentally killing a rabbit while mowing the lawn and finding some baby bunnies. Via the Chronicle-Telegram:
As [the man] tells it, Accorti allegedly showed up Tuesday afternoon, grabbed the rabbits, which Jones had put in a bucket to protect, and began smashing the heads of the rabbits on the tailgate of his truck in view of Jones.
“We didn’t even exchange five words,” [the man] said. “It was just ‘thud!’ and their necks were broken. He tossed them in the bed of the truck and came back and said, ‘Where’s the dead one?’ and tossed it too. He wasn’t even here five minutes.”
When asked about it, Police Chief Michael Freeman said, “It’s not pleasant.”
Accorti was fired the next day.
“We relieved him of his duties because he didn’t follow procedures,” the chief told the paper. “We feel that there wasn’t proper communication between the landowner and him … and we didn’t feel he correctly dispatched that particular call, and as a result we let him go.”
