Font ResizeANCHORAGE-Jackie Conn is Alaskan, born and raised. She didn't always plan to be a detective. She had plans to be a physical education teacher, and she even considered becoming a veterinarian.
On Oct. 6 Detective Conn led an animal cruelty investigation by serving the first of two search warrants on a West Anchorage home.
With Conn were nine Anchorage police detectives and Animal Care and Control officers.
This is not Conn's day job, so to speak. She's a detective with Anchorage Police Department's theft unit, which averages about 100 felony cases every week. Conn has a heavy workload but, out of a love for animals, she makes time for animal cruelty cases.
On her desk, her cases are color-coded. The red ones are animal abuse cases. She has 14 of those.
Last October, Conn became the official go-to person for all animal abuse cases. But investigator animal abusers is something she's been doing unofficially during her 13 years with the department.
"If she wasn't working them, and hadn't recruited others to work them, they wouldn't get worked," said Lt. Dave Koch, Conn's supervisor. "At best, it might be handled as, 'Oh, there's too many animals here, and they call Animal Control. Well, Animal Control needs an officer to help them write a search warrant to help them investigate to bring the criminal charges. Without Jackie showing that interest, it just probably wouldn't get done."
That dedication has earned Conn
But you'll never hear Conn brag about awards.
"I like to do it because I get to get the bad guy," Conn said.
The "bad guy" in the West Anchorage case is nowhere to be found.
"All right, she's not answering," said Conn, who has tried to call the suspect. "We have the authority to go in however we can get in."
Once in, Conn said it's obvious she has a "textbook hoarding" case.
"We're guessing 20 or so cats, five dogs, a bird," Conn said, after the first walk-through. "One dog looks really, really bad, in distress. A lot of his hair's gone. He's just laying there. It looks like he's having a hard time breathing. Some cats are totally infected, so they're not in good shape at all."
The official count is 32 animals total.
"There's fecal matter," said Darren Hernandez, a theft detective helping with the search warrant. "The smell in there is absolutely terrible."
Conn said leaving the animals behind was not an option. For more than two hours, officers load up the animals to take them to Animal Care and Control for medical evaluation.
"Pain, obviously, pain and suffering," she said, looking away. "You can tell just by looking at some of them. There's no way they wouldn't be. Even living in smell like that isn't healthy. It just makes me angry."
Tomorrow night, in Part 2: Detective Conn serves the second search warrant at a rescue facility on Tudor. Plus, friends of the suspect speak out.
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