Paulette Dean, director of Danville’s municipal animal shelter, pleaded guilty Friday to a misdemeanor charge of fraudulently altering or destroying public records in her role as the city’s humane investigator.
Judge James Reynolds found that there was sufficient evidence to convict Dean. The maximum sentence possible is a year in jail and a fine of $2,500, but Reynolds deferred the sentence for six months.
If Dean pays the court costs and there are no more incidents in that six-month period, the charge will be dismissed, Reynolds said.
The plea, along with Dean’s acknowledgement of wrongdoing, holds her “accountable for her criminal actions while giving the court an opportunity to weigh that against her 30 years of public service and lack of a criminal record,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Newman said in a news release.
After she entered her guilty plea, Dean did not speak during the hearing except to answer yes or no questions from Reynolds. She declined to comment after the hearing.
Friday’s plea came about a month after Dean resigned from the humane investigator position, which is separate from her role with the Danville Area Humane Society.
Her resignation was prompted by a court motion, filed by Newman, that accused Dean of falsifying records.
The humane investigator is required to submit records related to animal cruelty and neglect investigations to the police department every quarter. Dean submitted records on June 1 for the first time in five years, and the report “did not appear to contain accurate information,” the motion said.
All 22 pages of the report were identical, except for a different quarter and year listed on each page, 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.
Though she pleaded guilty, Dean wrote in her July resignation letter that she “disagree[d] vigorously with the items stated in the motion.”
Reynolds did not say that the plea would affect Dean’s role as director of the animal shelter, where she has been at the center of years of controversy that have surrounded the agency, much of it over the shelter’s unusually high euthanasia rate.
In recent months, Dean’s leadership policies around adoption, fostering and partnerships have also been questioned by residents, though the city has maintained support of the shelter.
In a Friday afternoon phone call, City Manager Ken Larking said that the contract between the city and the shelter “remains in good standing.”
Earlier this month, the city announced that it plans to conduct a comprehensive assessment of local animal services, including the shelter, animal control and other groups.
“It’s good timing for conducting that study of all the services that we provide to animals and people related to that subject,” Larking said Friday. “When we conduct that review, there will be a number of recommendations that come forward,” and the city will work to implement those.
The shelter also ran into legal trouble with its recordkeeping this summer.
In June, the Virginia Board of Pharmacy fined the shelter $500 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 having incomplete certifications for two employees performing euthanasia.
Chief says police weren’t aware of humane investigator position, but Dean’s report ‘raised a red flag’
Police Chief Chris Wiles said in a July interview that the department had not received the required reports from Dean in five years — and he said he didn’t realize that it was supposed to.
The police department engaged Dean on occasion as a resource for animal welfare investigations and, if needed, with animal welfare court cases, said Wiles, who has been police chief since 2023. Wiles said he believed that was part of her role as director of the shelter.
“Candidly, [the humane investigator role] was not something my staff or I was even aware of,” Wiles said. “If we knew then what we knew now, we would’ve inquired about [the records], and if there had been an interruption, we would’ve touched base about that.”
As humane investigator for the city, Dean was supposed to investigate animal cruelty, neglect and abandonment cases and work with local prosecutors. She was first appointed to this role by the court in 1998 and has been reappointed repeatedly since then, most recently in May 2025. She was expected to serve a three-year term.
Larking said that she was not paid by the city for this work.
The state began phasing out the role of local humane investigators around 2008 because animal control officers were increasingly pursuing animal welfare investigations.
The police department has two full-time animal control officers who do their own paperwork and stay on top of investigations; Wiles said that’s why he wasn’t aware of the humane investigator position.
“That said, as part of that appointment, the impetus is on the humane investigator to do certain things,” like submit records, Wiles said. “That they weren’t submitted to us wasn’t really the problem.”
The problem was that upon inspection, all 22 pages of records appeared identical, except the year and quarter on each page. That raised a red flag, he added.
“When I say identical, I mean identical, like even down to copy marks,” Wiles said. “If you’re generating reports on a quarterly basis over five years, those documents are going to be unique in some way. … The documents all appeared to have been created contemporaneously to each other.”
The records were turned over to Newman, who submitted a motion to the Danville Circuit Court on July 15 to remove Dean from the position. Dean resigned later that day.
The motion said that Dean’s June 1 quarterly report covered the period from October 2021 to June 2026.
Each of the reports 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.
After her resignation in July, both Wiles and Dean said that the relationship between the shelter and the police department remains positive.
On Friday, police spokesperson Matt Bell said that “while the city is contracted with DAHS to provide shelter services, we will continue to maintain a professional relationship with them.”
The shelter’s board released a statement on the shelter’s Facebook page on July 17, expressing support for Dean after her resignation as humane investigator.
It emphasized that this resignation did not affect her role as shelter director.
“In an effort to prevent continued attention on a role that had become the subject of public controversy and to allow the shelter to remain focused on its mission, she chose to step aside,” the statement said. “Paulette’s decision to resign should not be interpreted as an admission of wrongdoing, but rather as an effort to reduce further distraction and allow the organization to move forward.”
Board President Kathleen Sullivan Contratto did not respond to a request for an interview in July.
About a dozen people came to the hearing to support Dean — board members, shelter employees and family members. Those asked for a comment declined to speak.
