The Dog That Ate Lawndale
During the month she was in jail, they called Edie Warwick the Martha Stewart of Tower 2. The reason for it, she says, is that she sat on her bed making flowers out of toilet paper to decorate the cell while two women made love in the bunk below.
“I used toothpaste to stick the flowers around,” she told me the other day, looking a little forlorn. “It was unreal.”
We sat in the living room of her modest home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Lawndale. A black dog nuzzled my cheek as I tried to take notes.
A prim and neatly coiffed 45, Warwick could be anybody’s first-grade teacher. I see her writing the alphabet on a blackboard, not tearing flowers out of toilet paper in the L.A. County Jail.
As a child in West Virginia, she saved lunch money to buy feed for stray animals and freed horses tethered in the snow. Even today, neighborhood kids bring her injured birds to nurse to health.
This is not a woman, I tell you, who belonged in a cell with hookers and heroin addicts. This is a woman next door who brings cookies over when you’ve got the flu. This is a woman in the choir singing “All Aboard for Jesus!”
Then why, I hear you ask, was Mrs. Sweetpants in the slammer? It was because of that damned dog which, had he nuzzled me one more time, would have found himself flying out a window. Nobody nuzzles me when I’m taking notes.
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Basically, Warwick was in jail because of trying to do good. It began in 1994. She was helping a friend move when she saw the aforementioned black dog wandering around in the street looking bewildered.
Fearful for the animal’s safety on the busy thoroughfare, she asked neighbors in the area if they knew whose dog it was. No one did. So, being kindly, she took the creature home and put an ad in the local newspaper under Found Dog.
Several days later, a man named Joseph French, accompanied by two young sons, came to claim the dog. But because the animal wouldn’t go to him, Warwick decided he wasn’t the rightful owner. French produced a photograph as proof, but she remained unconvinced.
Why, I asked her, would someone claim a dog that wasn’t his? She hesitated for a moment and said, “I’m not saying he [French] was going to do this but some people sell dogs to testing laboratories for $400.”
“A man accompanied by two young boys is going to claim a dog to sell to a lab?” I said. She shrugged noncommittally.
Her husband, Don, a concrete-cutting contractor who sat in on the interview, added, “Suppose it wasn’t his dog and the real owner claimed it the next day? Then what?”
French called the Sheriff’s Department. At one point, there were six patrol cars in front of the Warwick house. I’ve seen fewer cars respond to a homicide. A deputy told her to give the man his dog. She refused, still unconvinced that the dog belonged to French.
To spare you details of a case that has kicked around for three years, Warwick was arrested, tried, convicted of misappropriating found property and sentenced to six months in jail. She got out in a month.
“I traded my freedom for hers,” she said, gesturing to the dog, which French called Cassie and she calls Lady. “I sacrificed.”
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The case supposedly cost taxpayers $100,000. It cost the Warwicks $20,000 in legal fees. Warwick was kicked off her seat on Lawndale’s city Planning Commission, lost her child care business and ended up on antidepressants because of her time in jail. It is an experience she would not be pleased to repeat.
“I feel contaminated,” she said as the dog nuzzled me. “I feel damaged. I feel violated.”
Oddly, the court order that sent her to the lockup did not say she had to return Cassie/Lady, so it remains in her house, nuzzling visitors. It is a happy, tail-wagging dog that does not seem to be aware of the travail it has caused.
There remains the possibility of civil action by the French family, and the Sheriff’s Department is saying that Warwick has property that doesn’t belong to her and should be returned.
It still isn’t clear to me why she just didn’t give the damned dog back in the first place. Warwick, while determined, isn’t an animal activist. She will feed the pigeons in the park but not trash a lab to protect them from scientists who want to play with their innards.
But what I’m really not sure about is why a law enforcement agency in a county reeling from violent crime would spend three years concerned with a woman and a dog and why, in a world full of felons, a court would sentence her to jail over such a trivial matter.
I mean, consider this: L.A. City Councilman Mike Hernandez gets a little whack on the ass for snorting coke in his public office and Edie Warwick is locked in a cell for trying to save a dog, however bothersome it might be. What am I missing here?
Her actions may have been foolish, possibly rooted in some dark desire to punish herself, but even more foolish is a system that wastes time prosecuting and incarcerating the Martha Stewart of Tower 2 when the Sultan of Snort continues drawing public pay on the City Council.
Still, it’s time to end the epic, Edie. You made your point. Give the guy his dog back. Or at least keep the mutt out of my face.
Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com
