MURDER MOST FOWL!!

Humberto Rodriguez of Washington Heights was taken into custody for biting the head off his rooster and leaving the headless body out on his fire escape.

When police arrived on the scene, they were confronted by a large crowd of people jumping upand down and pointing at the headless bird. “¡Mirá mirá! ¡Gallo! ¡Esta muerto! ¡Se la mordió la cabeza! ¡No tiene cabeza!”

A neighbor, Maria Cuellar, was crying as she spoke to this reporter. “He was such a good rooster! He never cause trouble. My kids played with him all the time. We never needed no alarm clock."

Referring to Mr. Rodriguez, she said, ”I can’t understand why he did this. They seemed like such a happy family.”

She said Señor Rodriguez had worked overtime at his job in a bagel bakery to get the money to bring the rooster to America from its home in the Dominican Republic. “The rooster, he didn’t have no papers. Señor Rodriguez had to pay extra money to the smugglers or they were going to sell the rooster to the Arab shish-kebob vendors on Sixth Avenue.

“When he finally got the rooster home, we had such a big party, with cake and everything.”

Señora Cuellar said the trouble started soon after, when the rooster, whose name was Pepito, told Señor Rodriguez that he wanted to move out. “He wanted to get his own place.”

Señor Rodriguez responded by keeping the rooster tied to a rope on the fire escape. The owner’s mental health deteriorated, and he stopped taking his anti-depressant medication. “He started drinking,” said Señora Cuellar. “He was talking about going back to the DR and taking Pepito with him.”

The breaking point came when Señor Rodriguez came home and found the rooster picking on Manuela, a pigeon that Señor Rodriguez also kept in the apartment. “We heard fighting all day in the apartment, and when Humberto came home, he found all the furniture destroyed. He just went crazy!

“He said, ‘No matter what I do, that rooster won’t obey!”

Finally, according to Señora Cuellar, Señor Rodriguez just snapped. “He must have been watching that Ozzy Osbourne video, the one where he bite the head off the rat.

“The next day, Pepito was laying dead on the fire escape with no head. The whole barrio went crazy!”

At a press conference, Mayor Bloomberg displayed an x-ray of the rooster Pepito showing that the rooster had been decapitated.

The mayor said, “When domestic violence rears its ugly head, innocent barnyard animals suffer the consequences.” He appealed to the city’s Dominican population to keep their livestock segregated in separate rooms of their apartments.

“We can take an example from Fidel Castro, when he visited New York to address the United Nations. He kept the goats in one room and the chickens in another. That way it was an orderly dispersal of poultry.”

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told the press that Señor Rodriguez was being held for observation in the high security ward of Bellvue Hospital. He added that there was an ongoing investigation into whether the rooster’s head, which is still unaccounted for, had been used in a santeria black magic ceremony. “Sometimes, instead of buying a phone card, they use santeria to communicate with their relations back in the Dominican Republic.”

Rabbi Buttman of the Kosher Society said that even though the rooster was technically a kosher chicken, it could not receive a Jewish funeral because the head was missing. “Jewish law is very strict on this point.”

The whole sad story was summed up by Señora Cuellar. “What a waste of good meat!”

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Posted on 7/29/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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