Paulette Dean has run the Danville Area Humane Society since 1992. In that time, her shelter has euthanized animals at a rate six times the Virginia state average. State inspectors have found decomposing rodents, cockroaches, incorrect drug dosages, and animals left without veterinary care. The Virginia Board of Pharmacy fined the shelter for drug recordkeeping violations. A beloved dog named Eve was euthanized despite her microchip showing she should have been returned to another shelter.

Now it is worse. A motion filed in Danville Circuit Court accuses Dean of submitting fabricated records to the city's police department. Over a five-year period, she was required to file quarterly reports documenting her work as the city's humane investigator. Instead, she submitted 22 pages of nearly identical documents, all produced at once, covering a period from October 2021 to June 2026. When police arrived to execute a search warrant for the real records, Dean told them she had already destroyed them.

Dean resigned from the humane investigator role after the motion was filed. She remains director of the shelter.

That is not accountability. Resigning a secondary position while keeping the top job is not a consequence for destroying evidence and fabricating official records. The Danville city government has continued to express confidence in the shelter's leadership through every one of these failures.

Sign this petition and demand that Danville City Manager Ken Larking and the Danville City Council remove Paulette Dean as director of the Danville Area Humane Society immediately. The animals in that shelter deserve better than this.