photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A Lawrence Police Department patrol vehicle is pictured June 28, 2022.

A maintenance man for an apartment complex in southwest Lawrence reportedly shot and killed a group of raccoons in the complex’s dumpster — in front of children — and now could face charges of animal cruelty and unlawful discharge of a firearm.

The incident occurred Friday at Village at West End, a complex at 4410 Clinton Parkway operated by Midwest Property Management.

Laura McCabe, a spokeswoman for the Lawrence Police Department, confirmed that police and Animal Control officers responded to the incident and forwarded an affidavit to the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office to consider charges of animal cruelty and unlawful discharge of a firearm. McCabe said that two raccoons had been shot dead and that a third was so badly injured that it was taken from the scene and “dispatched” by Animal Control.

McCabe confirmed that children were present and that shell casings from a firearm were collected. She said that the man, who has not been arrested or charged, admitted shooting the animals but said that he had done so because they were hissing and aggravated.

The man’s account differs from the account of a family who lives near the dumpster and witnessed the incident. The father of that family told the Journal-World this week that his 14-year-old had gone to take out the trash, noticed the raccoons in the dumpster and believed that they were stuck there. He said that she and a friend tried to coax the animals away so that they wouldn’t be injured by trash bags being thrown into the dumpster, but the raccoons wouldn’t move.

The girl then called her mom for ideas on how to keep the animals safe. The mom called the maintenance man, who reportedly said that he’d come help, but when he arrived “he simply pulled a gun out” and shot the animals, the father said. The 14-year-old saw the killings, as did two smaller children, he said.

The shootings traumatized the kids, he said, but also could have seriously harmed them “if a bullet had ricocheted off the dumpster.”

The father did not know if the gun was a pellet gun or a handgun, he said.

McCabe said that the proper thing to do when confronted with wildlife in this kind of setting is to call a pest control company or to call police and seek advice on how to handle the situation. Shooting an animal, especially in the city limits, is not the answer, she said.

The city’s Animal Control units typically do not respond to requests to remove healthy wildlife from private property, but will respond in certain situations if warranted.

Midwest Property Management had not responded to the Journal-World’s requests for comment by Wednesday afternoon.

The Journal-World reported on an incident years ago in which Animal Control did help save raccoons who were in danger of being crushed to death by a city trash truck. In that incident, an Animal Control officer used a lasso tool to pull the animals to safety, and they were released into a nearby field.

“If we hadn’t have seen them, they probably would’ve been squashed or suffocated,” the officer said at the time.

photo by: Journal-World File

In this file photo from July 13, 2009, Shelly Nichols, an Animal Control officer in Lawrence, lassos one of two young raccoons who wound up in the back of a city sanitation vehicle. The sanitation crew halted their work until Nichols arrived and freed the animals in a nearby field.