An Abbotsford woman is outraged after a volunteer member of the Abbotsford Police Citizens’ Patrol ran over her cat on Sunday afternoon.

Christina Scott said Bandit, the family pet, is badly injured, may not survive, and she has been left with close to a $1,200 vet bill.

Scott wants somebody to take some sort of responsibility for the incident.

“I want an apology to begin with and the vet bill paid, and some kind of justice for his driving. Just because he’s a volunteer there’s not any action,” she said.

“She’s part of our family. They had to remove her eye and sew her socket shut. The cat came home [Wednesday], and it’s still not drinking or eating. We have to force feed her.”

The cat’s jaw may be broken and her breathing is laboured, which means a return visit to the vet.

Scott was in the front yard of her home on George Ferguson Way with a friend, her husband and a visitor when the incident happened around 12:30.

Two Citizens’ Patrol volunteers in a squad car turned up the alley adjacent to her house.

One volunteer leaned out the window and asked the visitor, Divi Sharma, who was buying a puppy from the Scotts, to move his car out of the alley and into the driveway.

As the patrol car accelerated around Sharma’s car it struck Bandit and continued on down the alley, said both Scott and Sharma.

Sharma said he yelled out and chased after the patrol car to get it to come back.

Scott said Bandit was on her property when it was struck while Sharma remembers the cat being beside the road.

However, both said the driver was unrepentant about hitting the animal.

Scott said he didn’t apologize, and wouldn’t give her his name. Her friend wrote down the car’s licence plate number to give to police.

An Abbotsford Police officer showed up at the home to investigate and later met the Scotts at the vet.

After some discussion between Scott and the attending officer, the police department paid a $200 deposit for Bandit’s medical care.

Abbotsford Police Const. Ian MacDonald said the payment of the deposit demonstrates a gesture of good faith by the department, which wanted the cat to get the attention it needed.

“Immediately after the incident we paid the $200 deposit to get the cat medical treatment before there was any determination of responsibility,” he said.

The next step will be to try and determine the volunteer Citizens’ Patrol driver’s responsibilities.

“We still don’t know all the circumstances . . . was the cat on the road, was the driver momentarily distracted?

“We’re not suggesting we’re not going to pay additional bills, but we want to know what the bills are, and we have to make a determination as to whether the volunteer driver was culpable in causing injury to the cat.”

Scott has said she has submitted the bill to police, but hasn’t gotten word if the department will pay it or not.

MacDonald said the issue will be addressed by the inspector in charge of community policing, once he returns from his annual leave.