Yahoo Autos Texas Influencer's DUI Arrest Leads To Spider Monkey Confiscation, And Now She Wants Him Back
Dallas police reportedly arrested Texas-based influencer Brandi Botello Saturday morning on a charge of driving while intoxicated. Oddly enough, while the police didn’t name Botello in their statement, the influencer later contacted NBC Dallas Fort Worth to identify herself. Why? Because, following her arrest, authorities also took her pet spider monkey Jorgie Boy, and she wants him back even though her city doesn’t allow residents to keep wild animals as pets. Also, as NBC News reports, it has since been discovered that Jorgie Boy has rickets, a bone disease caused by malnutrition.
As Botello told NBC News, she was intoxicated at the time of the crash but was passed out in the passenger seat holding Jorgie Boy, her almost-three-year-old spider monkey. She alleges a male companion was actually the one driving at the time and says she only moved into the driver’s seat out of confusion, telling the news outlet, “I didn’t even know what was going on. I slept through the car accident. I didn’t even know we were in an accident. I wasn’t driving,” adding, “I hopped over to the driver’s seat. I didn’t know we crashed in front of the police station. When I turned around there was a cop right there and he was trying to accuse me of driving, but I wasn’t driving,”
Neither Botello, her monkey nor her human companion were seriously injured in the crash, with Jorgie Boy initially taken in by Irving animal control before being transferred to an animal sanctuary that has since been identified as Funky Monkey Ranch in Burleson, Texas. There, they found he only weighed six pounds, less than half of what a spider monkey of a similar age should weigh. Jorgie Boy also suffered from small bone fractures and appears to also have problems with his liver and pancreas. As you can imagine, the owner of the sanctuary has no plans to return Jorgie Boy to Botello.
Still, Botello wrote on Instagram that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, “He means more to me then anything in this world I’m not going to let one little mistake break me I’m willing to change anything and everything for him.” She then continued, saying, “Being at the wrong place at the wrong time is a real thing. I owned up to it ... I know I’m a good mom ... WE ALL KNOW that!”
Ignoring the part where a monkey is a pet, not a child, as we all know, good moms often do let their kids’ rickets go untreated. It happens all the time, just like scurvy, polio, and measles. If Jorgie Boy wasn’t safe with his mom, where will this stop? Who’s to say the big, evil government won’t soon step in when it discovers human children have easily preventable diseases? Are we also going to have to teach them to read, too? If you ask me, Texas sure is starting to sound a lot more like Commie-fornia every day. Absolutely ridiculous! What happened to the land of the free?
