Lawyer: Woman charged with stealing $88K from cat shelter no 'mastermind'

The lawyer for a woman charged with stealing nearly $90,000 from the Macon animal shelter she used to run said Tuesday that the woman is no "criminal mastermind."

Anne Brennaman, arrested Monday on a fiduciary theft charge, would "give the shirt off her back if she thought it would help the animals," the attorney said.

Brennaman, 59, has been implicated in a theft probe that began in August when a volunteer at Macon Purrs N Paws, the Riverside Drive nonprofit shelter that Brennaman founded, filed a police report.

Bibb County sheriff's officials have said that the case moved forward after "a standard compliance review revealed inconsistencies with invoices and paperwork" at the shelter.

The accusation last summer said Brennaman had used some of the funds for travel abroad.

Officials said Monday that the amount Brennaman misappropriated totaled $88,848.

On Tuesday, a day after Brennaman was jailed, a judge set her bond at $20,000.

Brennaman, who has undisclosed health problems, was in a wheelchair at her first-appearance hearing in the county jail. She held an oxygen machine on her lap.

Last week, she filed a lawsuit against a group that has since taken over the shelter under a new name, accusing the group of failing to follow the nonprofit's bylaws and improperly engineering her ouster.

"Our position is she basically rubbed some of the other people the wrong way, and this is sort of the fallout from that," her attorney, Dustin Buttigieg, said.

"A lot of times, these cases you have to look at the intentions of the parties. ... A lot of the money that was taken out of this account was reimbursed. ... It's sort of a mountain out of a molehill."

Buttigieg added: "As you saw her in the courtroom, she certainly doesn't look like the criminal-mastermind type. ... All of a sudden she's arrested and she's in prison with her oxygen machine. That strikes me as strange."

He doesn't think the charges against Brennaman will stick.

"She's one of the few people that I honestly believe didn't do anything wrong in this case," Buttigieg said.

To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.