Mee-ow!
The assistant DA in a bizarre “self-defense” cat-bludgeoning trial sunk her prosecutorial claws into tabby terminator Joseph Petcka yesterday, calling him not only a liar, but a loser.
“He was a washed-up, never-made-it-to-the-big-leagues athlete,” prosecutor Leila Kermani told the Manhattan jury in her closing arguments.
“He was a D-minus-list actor,” she threw in, going on to slam him as a layabout, a moocher and pretty much a male bimbo – mere “arm candy” for his far more successful girlfriend.
“He had zero income,” she told jurors, who continue deliberations today, “and no real prospects.”
Petcka – a retired Mets minor-league relief pitcher who has appeared in little more than a single episode of “Sex and the City” – is facing a possible two years in prison on felony animal-cruelty charges for kicking to death his then-girlfriend’s cat, Norman, last year.
Yesterday, jurors deliberated four hours without answering the question at the crux of the case – did Norman have it coming?
Petcka, 37, of Brooklyn, contends Norman ambushed him three or four times on that booze-drenched night. The actor spent two days on the witness stand last week, describing in terms rarely heard outside wildlife documentaries how the cat stalked him.
The 7-and-3/4-pound kitty “bared his fangs,” “reared around,” “lunged” and “growled” at him, he told jurors, describing earnestly the disturbing occurrences in the living room-turned-jungle of his girlfriend’s Greenwich Street apartment.
Petcka showed jurors photos of the punctures on his right hand, and testified he twice took action against the fierce feline, once swiping it away with his hand and once kicking at it from a sitting position with his steel-toed motorcycle boots, demonstrating both maneuvers from the witness box.
“It’s not illegal to deliver a swift, hard kick to a biting cat,” defense lawyer Charles Hochbaum told jurors in his own closing arguments. And the ASPCA’s own evidence photos of Norman’s food and water bowls, as placed on the kitchen floor by his client, demonstrate his “somewhat caring nature,” Hochbaum said.
“Did he over-react?” the lawyer asked. “Did he kick [Norman] too hard? Yes. That’s not against the law.”
But prosecutors insist Petcka kicked the cat to death in a drunken, vengeful rage after his successful girlfriend, Sports Illustrated reporter Lisa Altobelli, broke up with him, threatened to call the cops on him, then stormed out of her apartment.
Then, she argued, he concocted his story in which little Norman lunged at him with “fangs of fury.”