Mogensen

The former director of the Reston Zoo has pleaded guilty to one charge of animal cruelty after she drowned an injured wallaby early last year, the Post reports:

Meghan Mogensen, 27, of Silver Spring, was sentenced to one month in jail and is barred from making decisions about the care or euthanasia of any animal if she serves as an animal caretaker or manager of a zoo or sanctuary.

Under the terms of the deal, a second charge for possession of an animal euthanasia drug without a license was dropped.

Mogensen had already been found guilty a court last year, but she appealed those verdicts. Last Friday she apparently changed her mind and opted to plead guilty.

Mogensen drowned the wallaby after it had been injured in its cage. While she originally claimed that she had euthanized it by injecting it with drugs, tipsters at the zoo told investigators that they suspected that she had drowned it in a five-gallon bucket instead. At her trial last September, a former curator at the zoo testified that other animals had been killed in similarly brutal ways: in one case, chickens were fed to pythons. A year prior a researcher at the National Zoo was found guilty of trying to poison stray cats.

Mogensen’s father owns the 30-acre zoo, which is closed for the winter but is scheduled to reopen in March.