Animal lover, 79, sentenced to jail for feeding stray cats

A kind-hearted animal lover has been jailed for feeding stray cats abandoned by her neighbor.

Nancy Segula was hit with 10 days in Cuyahoga County Jail in Ohio after breaking a law banning residents of Garfield Heights, where she lives, from feeding stray cats and dogs.

Segula, who is due to begin her sentence on August 11, said: ‘It’s too much of a sentence for me for what I’m doing. When there are so many people out there that do bad things.’

Her son Dave Pawlowski spoke of his fears for his mother at the infamous jail, saying: ‘I couldn’t believe what my mother was telling me. She gets 10 days in the county jail, I couldn’t believe it.

‘I’m sure people hear about the things that happen downtown in that jail.

‘And they are going to let my 79-year-old mother go there?’

Segula says she began feeding the cats two years ago, and got her first citation ordering her to stop doing so the same year.

She received a total of four of those warnings, before being dragged before magistrate Jeffrey Short last week.

Segula told Fox8: ‘It began in 2017 with me feeding stray kitties. I used to have a neighbor that had a couple cats and he moved away so he left them.

‘I would always feed them and care for them because I was worried about them and I’m a cat lover.

‘Once my neighbors got upset about it, they called the animal warden.’

A spokesman for the town of Garfield Heights has yet to comment on the draconian sentence, leaving Segula increasingly worried that she is going to spend a week and a half behind bars.