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Woman sentenced in case that sparked Springfield cat-eating rumours

Canton Police Department A woman with her hands behind her back surrounded by two officers, one shining a bright light at the camera, in a blurry imageCanton Police Department
Allexis Ferrell being led away by officers in a still from police bodycam footage

An American woman whose case was one of the sparks behind a baseless claims about Haitian immigrants has been sentenced to a year in prison for animal cruelty.

Authorities said that Allexis Ferrell, 27, attacked a cat in Canton, Ohio.

Ferrell is a US citizen and the incident happened about 170 miles (270km) away from a large Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio.

Her case was one of several incidents cited online, which fed into rumours about immigrant eating pets. The stories were eventually repeated by President-elect Donald Trump and his vice-presidential running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance.

Ferrell was sentenced on Monday after previously pleading guilty to cruelty to companion animals.

She also was ordered to serve an additional 18 months for violating probation conditions from a previous child endangerment charge.

On 16 August, Canton police responded to a report of a woman smashing a cat’s head with her foot and eating the animal.

An officer saw blood on her feet and fur on her lips, according to local news reports.

According to the Canton Repository newspaper, Stark County Common Pleas Judge Frank Forchione told Ferrell: “This is repulsive to me. I mean, that anyone would do this to an animal.

“I can’t express the disappointment, shock, disgust that this crime has brought to me,” the judge said at the sentencing hearing.

In several posts online, Ferrell was falsely described as an immigrant.

However, Canton Police told the BBC that they had "not dealt with any complaints of Haitian immigrants at all."

Springfield police also denied the rumours, saying at the time: “There have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

Springfield is a city of about 60,000 people in south-west Ohio, where 12,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrants have settled in recent years, mostly drawn by work in local factories.

Rumours about eating pets circulated in the city earlier this year, before the Canton incident. An unrelated post on Reddit appeared to show a man carrying a dead bird in Columbus, Ohio, and a Facebook message mentioning the rumours was posted on a Springfield crime board.

These disparate stories were grafted together by anti-immigrant and pro-Trump influencers online, forging an unsubstantiated rumour later repeated by Vance online – that foreigners were catching and consuming pets in Springfield.

During the presidential debate in September, Trump said: "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats.”

Vance later told CNN that the pet-eating stories were based on “first-hand account of my constituents” but did not provide further details.

The BBC has contacted Vance’s office.

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do," he told CNN.