A Bronx man who tortured his cat to death as part of an occult ritual boasted of the killing online and threatened to attack animal lovers outraged by the sickening abuse, court documents show.
“Yeah, I killed the cat. I’m gonna do it again on the 31st. There’s nothing you can do to stop me. I’ll make Swiss cheese out of you. I have a bomb,” suspect David Mosely stated in a YouTube video posted on Wednesday.
Mosley was arraigned in Bronx Criminal Court Friday on charges including criminal mischief and aggravated cruelty to animals in response to disturbing images and videos the suspect posted to social media, prosecutors with the Bronx DA’s office said.
One image posted earlier this month on Mosley’s now-deleted Instagram account, @churchofububal, depicted a white and gray tabby cat lying in a circle drawn on a wooden floor, with blood pouring from its mouth and surrounded by arcane symbols scrawled on the walls, according to court documents.
“You should have heard the big squeal,” was written beneath the image, prosecutors say.
A forensic veterinarian with the ASPCA analyzed an Oct. 11 video that showed Mosley with a live tabby cat and compared it to the dead animal featured in the Instagram post, concluding they were one and the same, according to a criminal complaint.
When police arrested Mosley during an early morning raid of his Bronx apartment, they found “dried fluids” coating his floor and damage to his apartment in excess of $1,500 due to “cryptic notations” scrawled on the walls, court documents show.
Mosely’s arrest early Thursday morning woke his neighbor, Kendal Augustus, 63.
“It was 4:30 in the morning, and the cops broke down his door,” Augustus said. “There was a lot of noise, bringing him out.”
Augustus, a retired veteran, said he was used to strange sounds coming from Mosely’s apartment at odd hours.
“There was always a lot of banging and screaming in there,” Augustus said. “It would be 3 a.m. and he would be yelling and making all that damn noise.”
Another neighbor who declined to give his name said police combed the neighborhood looking for Mosely.
“The police were here last week. They were canvassing the neighborhood,” he said. “That’s the guy police were looking for,” he said when shown a picture of Mosely. “They were saying he was killing cats.”
Local veterinarians and animal-rights groups shared Mosley’s posts online in an effort to prevent the suspect from adopting other animals after he posted a video vowing to reenact the slaughter on Halloween, according to the director of a local dog rescue.
“He’s talking about how he wants to charge money for people to watch him live on Halloween ritualistically torture and kill a cat,” said the director of Canine Protection League, who gave her name as Bunny. “He’s saying Oct. 31 is going to be live for members only. He wants to charge admission for his next video. People didn’t believe him when he said he would slaughter the first cat. Now he’s saying, ‘You know I’m for real.’”
Bunny said a Bronx-based veterinarian contacted her organization about Mosley.
“The noises the cat made were really horrendous and scary,” Bunny said. “[The veterinarian] wrote to a bunch of rescues to tell us to be on the alert for this guy and not adopt any animals to him.”
Mosley pleaded “not guilty” at his arraignment Friday. He is due back in court in two weeks.