Paulette Dean, longtime director of the Danville Area Humane Society, is accused of falsifying records in her role as the city’s humane investigator, according to a motion filed Wednesday in Danville Circuit Court.
The court document seeks to remove Dean from this position. Dean said Thursday afternoon that she resigned from the position after the motion was filed, but she will remain director of the animal shelter.
“After 28 years of being the court-appointed humane investigator, I no longer am,” she said.
As humane investigator for the city, Dean investigated animal cruelty, neglect and abandonment, working with local prosecutors on court cases. She was reappointed to the position in May 2025 and was expected to serve a three-year term.
The position requires her to submit a quarterly report to the city’s police department. The motion said that Dean’s June report documents “do not appear to provide accurate information.”
Dean said that she disagrees with the items in the motion. Despite her resignation from the court-appointed position, the shelter will continue to work with the police department when needed, she said.
“If at any given time, the police department had asked us to do records a certain way, we would have done so,” Dean said.
She has been the center of much of the controversy surrounding Danville’s municipal animal shelter, which has been criticized for decades for its high euthanasia rates, strict adoption policies, disorganized recordkeeping and unwillingness to partner with other animal welfare organizations.
Motion to remove Dean as humane investigator
The motion filed by Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Newman alleges that Dean falsified records about investigations and seizures.
Dean was required to record all investigations she performed and maintain those records for five years, submitting a quarterly report to the Danville Police Department.
The motion said that Dean’s June 1 quarterly report included 22 pages and covered the period from October 2021 to June 2026.
All pages of the report were identical, except for a different quarter and year listed on each page, according to the motion. Each report said that there had been no animal seizures during that period.
The police department and its animal control officers have been aware of and involved in “numerous investigations alongside Ms. Dean over the course of more than five years,” the motion said.
The records “appear to be mass produced instead of individually completed over the course of the last five years,” according to the motion.
Also, Dean submitted the report on a form that has not been used by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services — which oversees the state’s animal shelters — in over 20 years, the motion said.
On July 10, Assistant Police Chief Henry Richardson obtained a warrant to search the animal shelter for the records Dean was required to keep, according to the motion. When he went to execute the warrant, Dean told him that she had destroyed all the records, the motion states.
Dean then told Richardson she had created the June quarterly report records at the end of May or early June “to meet the reporting requirement for the previous five years since the records were incomplete,” according to the motion.
The motion recommends that Dean be removed as the city’s humane investigator.
Newman was not immediately available for comment Thursday about what will happen next regarding the motion.
Dean said she was already considering resigning from the position when the motion was filed.
“It’s been about six years since I’ve gone out on a call in the community anyway, as society has gotten coarser and I’ve gotten older, and the animal control officers are quite capable,” Dean said. “We will continue to work with them, and it has nothing to do with my position at the shelter.”
Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, has been publicly critical of the shelter since April, when it euthanized a beloved dog named Eve, who should have been returned to the Lynchburg Humane Society based on her microchip information. The dog had been adopted from Lynchburg, but returned to the Danville shelter.
“The revelation that Ms. Dean submitted false records to the Danville police in her role as the humane investigator is both shocking and disappointing,” Stanley said Thursday. “However, I think this demonstrates one of the many symptoms of the disease that is pervasive at the Danville Humane Society, in my opinion.”
Ongoing controversy at the shelter often focuses on Dean
Dean has been director since 1992, and she has led the Danville Area Humane Society for 34 of the 42 years that it’s been Danville’s municipally contracted animal shelter.
Over the years, the shelter has come under fire primarily for its high euthanasia rates, which were 58% in 2025. That’s the lowest they’ve been in at least three years, but it’s still far above the state average of 9%.
The Danville shelter attributes its high euthanasia rates to high animal intake. High intake is due in part to an open-admission policy, which means that the shelter accepts every animal, regardless of the animal’s health or space and resource constraints.
Dean has remained staunchly committed to the open-admission model, saying there’s nowhere else for animals to go if shelters turn them away.
But the criticism of the Danville shelter has moved past the open-admission and limited-admission conversation. Residents and directors of nearby shelters say that many open-admission animal shelters still euthanize far fewer animals than Danville.
Instead, residents and animal welfare groups question why adoption is more difficult at the Danville shelter than at others, and they’ve raised concerns about euthanasia and sedation practices and the shelter’s perceived unwillingness to collaborate with other organizations.
Much of this criticism eventually comes back to Dean, who, along with the shelter’s board and staff, makes decisions about adoption policies, collaborations and euthanasia.
“It feels personal,” Dean said of the criticism in a May interview.
In recent months, the shelter has been the focus of a string of controversies.
In February, VDACS notified the city of a potential $750 fine as a result of a November inspection of the shelter.
The inspection, obtained by Cardinal News through a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request, identified unsanitary conditions, including decomposing rodents, rodent droppings and cockroaches, as well as incorrect drug dosages, a lack of veterinary care for some animals and “random” medications given to others.
VDACS waived the fine after Dean submitted a letter demonstrating “a good-faith effort to reach compliance,” according to correspondence records obtained by Cardinal News.
In April, Eve’s euthanization drew public outcry and the attention of Stanley, who said that he will work to shut down the shelter unless improvements are made.
In June, the Virginia Board of Pharmacy also found fault with the shelter’s recordkeeping. The board fined the shelter $500 in June for recordkeeping that violated state code: failing to document the name and strength of sedative drugs, not using correct dosages for euthanasia drugs, not taking proper inventory of controlled drugs for over two years and incomplete certifications for two employees performing euthanasia.
Danville city government has maintained support of the shelter despite its euthanasia rates and public complaints.
“I have confidence in DAHS leadership and their commitment to proper protocols and legal standards,” said City Manager Ken Larking in April.
Larking is the only city official who has spoken to Cardinal News about the animal shelter. Several city council members and the mayor either did not respond to a request for an interview or passed the inquiry along to Larking.
Larking is out of the office this week and did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the motion.
