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3 Sick Cats Euthanized After 10 Others Found Dead

WEST KENDALL (CBSMiami) – Three cats, suffering from an apparent poisoning incident, were euthanized Tuesday due to their poor condition.  The cats were picked up Monday in a neighborhood in the Hammocks after a neighbor called to report nearly a dozen stray cats were dead or dying on her street.

Miami-Dade Animal Control said it appeared someone poisoned them.

Animal Control officer Michael Garateix took away a total of 10 dead cats. A few cats, which appeared to be healthy, remain on the street and Animal Control officers are setting up traps Tuesday to try and catch them.

All of the cats were strays, but Concetta Ciaccio and her daughters knew them by name. For years, they came to Ciaccio's house on 147th Place for food. Ciaccio said she started feeding the cats after people moved away and abandoned them following Hurricane Andrew.

She noticed on Sunday that something was wrong. Ciaccio said there were dead cats in her yard and on the street others were dying.

"It's terrible," said Ciaccio, "I'm not going have such a nice Thanksgiving now because somebody did something like this."

Her daughter, Denise Betancourt, wiped away tears as she watched the cats struggling to stay alive.

"I can't believe it. It's awful. It's awful to see them convulse like this. The situation is terrible I can't believe that someone doesn't have a heart," Betancourt said.

Ciaccio moved the cat's bodies out of the street and put them in her garage to keep them from being run over. She thinks someone purposely poisoned them.

"It's terrible it's like a massacre to me and that someone could do something like that it's awful," she told CBS4's Maggie Newland.

"Most definitely sounds like a poisoning case," said animal control officer Michael Garateix. "But those cases can be difficult to solve. It might be something that a neighbor might know who it is but they might not want to get involved might not want to rat on a neighbor," said Garateix.

Animal Control will perform a necropsy on one of the cats to determine what killed them.

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