Part 2: I’m A Female Police Officer In Tennessee — Ten Years Ago I Spent $2,000 Of My Own Money To Get A Domestic Violence Survivor And Her Two Pit Bulls Into An Apartment Because No Shelter In Our State Would Take Her Dogs
I’m going to tell this slow. The slow part is the whole story.
I sat in my patrol car at 10:30 p.m. on August 14th, 2015, and I called nine shelters.
Three in Chattanooga. Two in Cleveland. One in Athens. Two in Knoxville (the closest to Mrs. R’s mother). One in Nashville, on a long shot.
The conversations were almost identical.
Me: “Hi, I’m calling on behalf of a domestic violence survivor who needs emergency shelter tonight. She has a one-year-old son. She has two adult Pit Bulls. Can you accommodate?”
Them: “I’m so sorry. We don’t take dogs.”
Me: “Are there any exceptions? Boarding partners? Foster programs?”
Them: “We can refer her to a pet boarding service. Most of them won’t take Pit Bulls. The ones that do are about $45 a night, per dog.“
Me: “She doesn’t have $45 a night, per dog. She has nothing. She had to leave her wallet at the house.”
Them: “I’m so sorry, Officer. We can take her without the dogs.”
I called nine shelters in 37 minutes.
Nine no’s.
I sat in my patrol car. I looked out the windshield at the front porch where Mrs. R was sitting with her son. The dogs were now standing in the doorway, watching her.
I had no system to give her.
I had myself.
I went up onto the porch. I sat down on the second step next to where Mrs. R was sitting on the first step.
I said, “Mrs. R. I made nine phone calls. None of them can take Sunday and Mercy. I want to ask you a question. If I could find you an apartment by tomorrow afternoon — a regular pet-friendly apartment, not a shelter — and pay your first month and your deposit, would you go?”
She looked at me.
She said, “Officer. Why would you do that.“
I said, “Mrs. R. Because nobody else is going to. And because I am the one sitting on this porch with you right now.”
She started crying.
She had not cried up until that point. Domestic violence survivors often don’t cry right after the incident — they are still in survival mode. Mrs. R had been in survival mode for two and a half years at that point in her marriage. She had not cried in front of me until I had asked her about the apartment.
She said, “I have $83 in my checking account.”
I said, “That’s not a problem. I’ll cover it. You’ll pay me back when you can. I’m not going to charge you interest. You don’t have to pay me back at all if you can’t. I just need you to say yes.”
She looked at me for a long time.
She said, “Yes.“
That was the start of it.
I drove Mrs. R and her son and her two Pit Bulls to a hotel that night that allowed dogs — a Red Roof Inn off Highway 27 that I knew from previous calls. I paid for two nights cash, $164 plus a $40 pet fee for two dogs. The night manager — a woman named Renee Hodges, who is still there, who I see when I drive past — did not ask any questions. She had seen plenty of cops bring victims to her hotel before. She just took the cash and gave me a room key on the ground floor at the back, which I had asked for so the dogs could be walked easily.
I helped Mrs. R get the dogs and her son into the room. Sunday and Mercy walked next to her on slip leads, one on each side, like a perimeter she had not had to think about creating because they had created it themselves.
I left at midnight.
I went home. I had been off duty for an hour and a half by then. I sat at my kitchen table with my own dog Echo (he was 4 then, still my active K9 partner) and I opened my laptop and I started searching Zillow and Apartments.com and Craigslist for pet-friendly one-bedroom rentals in the Chattanooga area.
I found one at 1:30 a.m.
It was a small one-bedroom on the second floor of a converted Victorian on the south side of Chattanooga. Pet-friendly. Two pets allowed. No breed restrictions — which is the part that mattered, because most pet-friendly rentals have breed restrictions that exclude Pit Bulls. Rent was $675 a month. The listing said move-in costs were first month plus a $1,200 security deposit.
$1,875 total. Plus I’d need to pay a non-refundable pet deposit of $250, which the listing mentioned.
$2,125 total.
I had $4,200 in my checking account.
I had another $11,000 in a savings account that had been my grandmother’s funeral money. She had died in 2012 and left me a small inheritance.
I emailed the landlord at 1:47 a.m. I told him I had a friend who needed an apartment by tomorrow. I told him I was a Chattanooga Police officer (I included my badge number for verification). I told him I could bring cash and a cashier’s check in the morning.
He emailed back at 6:15 a.m. He said yes.
I went to my bank when it opened at 9 a.m. I withdrew $2,125. I drove to the apartment. I met the landlord — a man named Reggie Whitaker, 58 years old, retired from the Chattanooga school district, who I am still friends with today — and I handed him the money and signed the lease in my name.
I drove to the Red Roof Inn. I knocked on the door. Mrs. R answered with Sunday standing in the doorway behind her.
I held up the key.
I said, “Mrs. R. Pack your stuff. You and the kid and the girls have a new home. Just for now. Just until you figure out what’s next.“
She started crying again. She hugged me.
Sunday and Mercy crowded around our legs and pressed against us. Sunday licked my hand once. Mercy licked Mrs. R’s wrist.
I drove them to the apartment. I helped them unload the few bags Mrs. R had been able to bring from the hotel. I bought a $30 bag of dog food at the Walmart on the way. I bought some baby formula. I bought some basic groceries.
I left them at the apartment around 1 p.m.
I was supposed to be at work at 3.
I made it.
I want to tell you what happened next, because the part of this story that matters most is what Mrs. R did, not what I did.
Mrs. R lived in that apartment for six months.
She did not call her abuser. She did not return to the house. She moved her son into a daycare program that her court-appointed advocate helped her access. She got a part-time job at a hair salon (she had been a hairdresser before her marriage). She started saving money.
After six months, she had enough to pay her own rent for the first time. She paid me back the $2,125. She had asked from day one how she could pay me back. She had insisted.
She left Chattanooga in February of 2016. She moved to Knoxville to be near her mother. She and her son and Sunday and Mercy.
I drove up to see her in April of 2016. She had a small house she was renting on a quiet street. Sunday and Mercy had their own yard for the first time in their lives. Her son — by then 20 months old — was walking.
She made me coffee at her kitchen table.
She said, “Officer Beaumont. I want to ask you something.”
I said, “Anything.”
She said, “Are there other women like me? Who can’t leave because of their dogs?“
I said, “Mrs. R. Yes. There are a lot of them.“
She said, “What are you going to do about it?”
I said, “Mrs. R. I don’t know. I’m one cop. I have one savings account.”
She said, “Officer. You are one cop with one savings account who already saved me. Imagine what you could do if you were one cop with a hundred savings accounts.“
I drove home that day and I did not sleep that night.
I want to skip ahead through the next four years, because the details of each case are not mine to share.
Between September of 2015 and November of 2019, I quietly placed 12 more women in pet-friendly rentals using my own money. I drew from my savings. I drew from my paycheck. I sold my grandmother’s house in 2017 — a small bungalow in east Tennessee that had been left to me as part of her estate — and I put about $28,000 of the proceeds into the apartment fund. I drove a 2009 Honda Civic that whole time. I lived in a small one-bedroom that was rent-controlled. I did not take vacations. I did not eat out.
I helped twelve women.
Twelve women and twenty-three dogs and four cats and eight children.
I never told my precinct. I never told my chief. I told only two people: my best friend Yolanda Park, a court advocate for victims of domestic violence in our county, who helped me identify candidates and who handled all the social-work side of the work I could not legally do myself; and a former training officer of mine named Sergeant Hollis Trentham, who was 64 and three years from retirement and who I had served under as a rookie. Sergeant Trentham listened to me describe what I was doing in his backyard on a Saturday afternoon in spring of 2017, while we worked on his lawnmower together, and he did not say much. He just nodded slowly. And at the end of the conversation, before he handed me back the socket wrench, he said:
“Beaumont. You’re going to get caught. When you do, you call me. I will go to the chief with you. I will tell him what you’ve been doing. I will tell him why I have not reported you. And I will tell him that any disciplinary action against you is disciplinary action against me.“
He squeezed my shoulder.
He said, “Now do it right. Keep helping them.“
I got caught in November of 2019.
It was not Sergeant Trentham who reported me. It was a routine internal review.
I was up for a promotion to sergeant. The review process at CPD includes a financial background check — to look for red flags like gambling debts, undisclosed loans, or unusual cash movements. The investigator assigned to me, a clean and careful man named Lieutenant Carmine Spinelli, noticed something he could not initially explain: a recurring pattern in my bank statements showing significant cash withdrawals (between $1,200 and $3,500) about every four to six months for the previous three years, with no corresponding lifestyle inflation, no real estate purchases, no luxury items.
He flagged it for further review.
He sat me down in a conference room on November 8th, 2019.
He said, “Officer Beaumont. I need to understand these withdrawals.”
I had been preparing for this conversation for four years.
I told him everything.
Lieutenant Spinelli listened for about 40 minutes without interrupting. He took notes. At the end, he closed his notebook and he said:
“Officer Beaumont. I’m not the one who decides what happens to you. But I’m going to tell you something off the record. I have a daughter. She’s 24. She has a boyfriend I don’t like. She has a chihuahua she would die for. If she ever had to leave that boyfriend and they couldn’t take Bingo — I would want a cop to do for her what you did for these women.“
He paused.
He said, “Now I have to file the report.“
He filed it.
I was suspended without pay on November 13th, 2019, pending disciplinary review.
The thing about being suspended without pay is that nobody calls you to tell you they’re going to write a newspaper article about you.
Kalani Brooks — the 27-year-old Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter — had contacted me three weeks before my suspension. She had heard a version of my story from a mutual friend. She had been working on a long-form piece for the paper’s investigative series. I had agreed to verify details on background. I had told her she could quote me but not name me, and that any women I’d helped would have to give their own permission.
Five women said yes.
Her piece ran on Sunday morning, November 24th, 2019. Thanksgiving was on Thursday that year.
The headline was The Officer Who Bought 12 Apartments.
The piece told my story. It told the story of Mrs. R (anonymized). It told the story of Maritza Aguilar, an elementary school teacher who had been one of my early cases (named, with her permission). It told the story of a woman named Joelle Pace who had escaped a violent partner in 2017 with two Rottweilers. It told the story of three other women.
The piece quoted Sergeant Trentham — who had retired by then — who said on the record:
“Officer Beaumont broke a policy I helped write. She did it because the policy was wrong. Sometimes a cop’s job is to follow the rules. Sometimes a cop’s job is to be the person in front of you. Beaumont was the person in front of those women. The department is going to have to figure out what to do about that, but I’ll tell you what I think they should do. They should give her a medal and they should change the policy.“
The piece quoted Mrs. R (anonymously) on what I had said on her porch. The quote that became the most shared part of the article on Facebook was this:
“She told me I’d pay her back when I could and not to worry about interest. Nobody had said anything like that to me in years. I had stopped expecting anyone to be kind without it costing me something.“
The piece went up online at midnight Sunday morning. By Sunday afternoon it had 220,000 views on the Times Free Press website — more than any piece in the paper’s history.
By Sunday night it had been picked up by AP and was running on regional news websites across the Southeast.
By Monday morning it was on Good Morning America’s website.
By Tuesday it was on CNN.
By Wednesday — Thanksgiving Eve — a GoFundMe that Maritza Aguilar had quietly started on Sunday night had raised $187,000.
By Sunday December 1st, it was at $412,000.
By Tuesday December 3rd, my disciplinary review was closed without action.
By Friday December 6th, the Chief of Police held a press conference and announced that the CPD policy on officer personal assistance to crime victims was being reviewed, that I was being reinstated with back pay, and that I was being awarded a Chief’s Commendation.
By the following Monday I had hired a lawyer and a paralegal to help me start a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
We called it Paws and Protection.
I want to tell you what Paws and Protection does today, ten years later.
We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We operate four branches: Chattanooga, Knoxville, Atlanta (since 2021), and Charlotte (since this past spring, 2025).
We provide three main services:
Emergency placement. When a domestic violence survivor needs to leave a dangerous situation and cannot bring their pets to a traditional shelter, we cover first month’s rent and security deposit on a pet-friendly apartment. We do this within 24 hours of the request. We have placed 437 women in apartments since 2019.
Co-located housing. In each of our four cities, we now operate small family-and-pet shelter facilities — converted houses or small multi-unit buildings — where survivors and their pets can live together for up to 90 days while they figure out longer-term housing. These were a new model we had to develop. We worked with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence to establish protocols. We were the first of our kind in the United States in 2020. There are now seven similar facilities operating in other states, modeled on ours.
Pet medical care. When animals come into our care that have been harmed or neglected, we cover their veterinary bills. We have spent approximately $340,000 on veterinary care for survivor pets over six years. We have lost two dogs to injuries inflicted by their abusers. We have grieved both of them publicly.
Our annual operating budget is $1.4 million. We have nine full-time staff. Most of them are former clients who came back to work for us.
Our director of operations is Maritza Aguilar — the elementary school teacher who was my third case. She left her teaching job in 2021 to come work for us. She has been the operational backbone of Paws and Protection ever since.
Our development director is a woman named Cherise Bouchard-Lee who survived her abusive marriage with the help of one of our placements in 2020 and who is now, in her own right, a fundraiser of remarkable skill.
Our regional director in Atlanta is Mrs. R.
She is 37 years old now. Her son is 11. He is a fifth-grader at a public school in Atlanta. He is a small, kind, bright kid who loves the Atlanta Falcons. His name is Marcus, but he goes by Mac.
Sunday passed away in 2021 at age 12. She lived seven more years after the night I met her on the porch. She lived them well.
Mercy is still alive. She is 13 years old now. She is fat and gray-muzzled and she sleeps under Mrs. R’s desk at the Atlanta office. She greets every new client by walking up to them and putting her head on their knee. She is the unofficial mascot of our Atlanta branch.
There is a plaque on the wall of the Atlanta office.
The plaque has Mrs. R’s anonymized initials on it.
It says: “They will kill him if he kills me first, but they can’t get to him through the door.” — The first woman this organization served, August 14, 2015.
I read that plaque every time I visit Atlanta.
I cry every time.
I want to write a few things before I finish.
The first thing is this. The reason we exist — the reason Paws and Protection has to exist, the reason 48% of domestic violence victims delay leaving because of their pets — is because the American shelter system, for very understandable historical and legal reasons, was designed assuming that pets were not part of the survival equation.
That assumption was wrong. Pets are family. They have been family for as long as humans have been keeping them, and they will be family forever.
If you work at a domestic violence shelter and you do not yet have a pet protocol — please reach out to us. We have a free toolkit. We will walk you through it. We will fundraise alongside you. We will help.
The second thing is this. If you are reading this and you are in a situation like Mrs. R was in — please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. They are available 24 hours a day. They will know whether there is a pet-friendly shelter or program near you. If there isn’t one, they can connect you to organizations like ours.
You do not have to leave your dog behind.
You should not have to leave your dog behind.
There is a way out that includes your dog.
The third thing is this. If you are reading this and you are not in that situation but you know someone who is — please understand that the answer to “why doesn’t she just leave” is, very often, “because she has a dog she would die for and the system did not plan for that.”
That answer is not stupid. That answer is not weak. That answer is one of the most powerful expressions of love I have ever encountered as a cop.
The fourth thing is this. If you have the ability to donate to organizations like ours — please do. The first $187,000 Maritza Aguilar raised in 2019 made everything else possible. Every $25 contribution we receive pays for one night of emergency hotel accommodation for a woman and her dogs. Every $700 contribution covers a first month’s rent in a pet-friendly apartment. Small donations are not small. They are the entire infrastructure.
The fifth thing is this. Sergeant Hollis Trentham died in 2023 at age 68. He had retired four years earlier. He had spent his last four years volunteering at our Chattanooga office two days a week, helping us with intake paperwork and driving women to appointments. He never wanted to be on staff. He never wanted a title. He just wanted to keep helping.
The wall of our Chattanooga office has his photograph on it.
Under his photograph is one line I wrote on the day of his memorial service:
“He was the cop who told me to keep going. Then he came with me.”
I think about him every single day.
Mrs. R and I are still close. We talk on the phone every Sunday night. Mac calls me Aunt Tessa. I have been to every one of his birthday parties. I went to his first football game last fall.
Mercy was at that game. She rode there in the back of Mrs. R’s car. She watched from the sideline in a small Falcons jersey Mrs. R had ordered online. She was 13. She was tired. She slept in the back seat on the drive home.
I sat next to Mrs. R at that game and I watched Mac run for a touchdown.
I cried, because I am 40 years old now and I have started crying at football games and I cannot help it.
Mrs. R put her hand on my hand on the bleachers.
She said, “Tessa. You did this. You did all of this.“
I said, “Mrs. R. We did this. All of us. You did this. The kid you carried out of that house in your arms when he was a baby did this. Sunday and Mercy did this. Kalani Brooks did this. Sergeant Trentham did this. The 437 women and 612 dogs and cats we have helped did this. I just had the savings account.“
She squeezed my hand.
We watched Mac run.
That is the whole story.
If this story moved you, follow the page — there are more like Tessa and Mrs. R and Sunday and Mercy I haven’t told yet.
