An adorable jaguar cub was passed around between drug dealers and an OnlyFans model for the first few months of its life before it finally reached its ‘forever home.’
Tens of thousands of dollars were exchanged between multiple dealers to have the privilege of owning the exotic cat, but when they found the animal to be much of a hassle, they routinely found ways to get rid of it.
Six months after it was born, the jaguar cub was found abandoned at a San Diego animal sanctuary. It was malnourished, had patches of its fur missing and was covered in feces.
Trisha Meyer, a woman who went by ‘Texas Zookeeper,’ was the first to have possession of the jaguar cub, whom she called Amador.
Meyer, 42, would sell Amador in April 2021 to Abdul ‘Mannie’ Rahman, a marijuana dealer from California. And just over a year later, they were both indicted by federal prosecutors with the Central District of California for wildlife trafficking.
Before Meyer got busted for this, she had a following on Instagram; her account was called ‘Mimiseroticworld.’
Her account has since been toned down – featuring far less scantily clad posts – and was renamed to mimisexoticworld.
In her heyday, Meyer made money through an OnlyFans page and through selling exotic animals from her home in Texas, a state that has notoriously liberal laws on the types of pets people can own.
Meyer posted pictures of macaws, monkeys, tigers and foxes.
Amador appeared on Meyer’s Instagram when he was just 14 days old, and she was holding him in the palm of her hand while squeezing him to her cheek, the Los Angeles Times reported.
In one 2021 video, as the cub licked at the empty air while lying on Meyer’s lap.
‘thankful to be his momma #catmom,’ Meyer wrote about the cub.
Meyer even posed with Amador on her OnlyFans page, placing him in between her exposed breasts.
It’s unclear how Amador ended up in Meyer’s possession, though she has a long history of acquiring unusual animals.
When Amador was less than a month old, Meyer decided she would rent him out to high-paying customers instead of just selling him straight away.
People came to a Austin hotel room and paid $1,000 an hour just to have the pictures taken with Amador and cuddle with him.
Rahman was one of the people who ventured into this strange, yet lucrative hustle for Meyer.
As the cub wandered around on the hotel carpet, Rahman decided he wanted to buy it.
He paid a discounted rate of $25,000 and another $1,000 to have it transported from Texas to California, which is against the law.
‘All I knew was the jaguar was cute, and I had the money, and I wanted it,’ Rahman, 36, told the LA Times.
Meyer’s business of selling animals persisted long before she ever got her hands on Amador.
She was once accused of accepting money for a giraffe – which was valued at $30,000 to $150,000 – but never actually handing over the long-necked mammal, KBTX reported in November 2022.
This becomes a pattern with Meyer. A California resident who bought a Savannah kitten from her filed a criminal complaint in 2016 alleging he had never received it.
Authorities would catch up with Meyer in November 2016 in Nevada. They arrested her on a felony warrant out of Texas, but not before noticing three tigers loose in the backyard of the house she was staying at, LA Times reported.
Meyer was also charged with child endangerment, since a game warden discovered her 14-year-old daughter petting three tiger cubs in the backyard of her Houston home.
As a condition of her bond, she could no longer possess or sell exotic animals.
She’d later plead guilty in 2017 to a theft charged connected to the Savannah kitten sale that she never delivered on, receiving two years of probation.
She paid restitution and the child endangerment charge was dismissed, according to the Harris County district attorney’s office.
‘My child was never in danger, none of my four children have ever been in danger,’ Meyer told a reporter after her guilty plea. ‘Nobody’s been hurt by our animals.’
Meyer called her kids ‘young zookeepers.’
She also said teachers at her kids’ schools started referring to Meyer as the ‘tiger mom.’
‘She’s going to comply with the law to a T,’ her attorney, Penny Wymyczak-White, said.
This proved to be an elusive task for the ‘tiger mom’ who quickly racked up more criminal complaints against her.
In 2019, one customer alleged Meyer sold her a diseased Savannah kitten for $4,500. The cat would later die, and emaciation was the contributing factor, according to a necropsy.
As part of the same Texas criminal complaint, a Las Vegas-based buyer told investigators Meyer sold them five Savannah kittens for more than $16,000.
After one of them was infected with a deadly disease, all of them had to be euthanized.
A second criminal complaint alleged that a Nevada resident agreed to buy a Bengal kitten from Meyer for $6,500. The animal, hissing and thrashing in a bag, jumped out and attacked her.
She told police the cat drew blood. Later, she found out that Meyer sold her a Geoffroy’s cat – a wild species – and not a Bengal, which is exotic-looking but domesticated.
According to the complaint, Meyer initially agreed to take the cat back but blocked the buyer on social media, changed her phone number and never gave her a refund.
On April 17, 2021, right as all of these cases were working their way through the Harris County court system, Meyer took Amador, the jaguar cub to the Hyatt Regency hotel room.
It was the very same one where Amador illegally went home with Rahman, his new, short-lived owner.
When he arrived in Southern California, Amador was renamed Hades.
‘I’m an animal person. I love animals, especially wild ones,’ Rahman told the LA Times. ‘When I’m getting offered to buy a wild animal, and it’s so cute when you see it, when it’s small, who the f— is gonna say no? No one will.’
Rahman kept the growing jaguar in his five bedroom house in Murrieta, roughly an 80 mile drive from downtown Los Angeles.
Investigators said Meyer texted Rahman after photos of Hades were posted online, telling him to ‘get a handle on that.’
‘If I got word of it here. That means others are seeing that & will snitch and they will be trying to track him down,’ according to a California criminal complaint.
Meyer was allowed to own a jaguar in Texas, but she wasn’t allowed to transport it beyond state lines. It was also illegal for Rahman to own the jaguar in California.
Eventually Rahman realized that caring for Hades was too difficult, according to federal fish and wildlife investigators, and sold him for $20,000.
The person who bought it from Rahman lived in a house with ‘a pregnant wife or girlfriend,’ according to the October 2022 indictment against Meyer and Rahman.
That’s when the cub started showing up again in Instagram videos. Apparently the home was in Riverside County.
This caught the attention of Bobbi Brink, the founder and director of the Lions Tigers & Bears Sanctuary in San Diego County.
Brink notified Austin Smith, a warden with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
‘All we knew at that point was that there was a jaguar in Riverside,’ Smith told the LA Times.
The indictment claims that the person who bought the jaguar from Rahman eventually decided it would be best to take it to a rescue center after someone ‘expressed concerns about having a juvenile jaguar and a newborn infant in the same house.’
The person who expressed this concern – identified in court documents by initials ‘R.A.’ – teamed up with his roommate to get rid of the jaguar. They put it in a large dog kennel and drove it to an animal rescue center in Alpine, California, on September 17, 2021, according to the indictment.
It was Brink’s rescue center. Surveillance cameras captured a man driving up to the front gate at around 10 pm in a Mitsubishi Outlander before abandoning the dog kennel.
Brink remembered finding the jaguar the next day. It was shaking and urinating in fear, she said.
They named the cub after the construction worker who first found it: Eddie.
Once the jaguar was finally safe, it was time to shift focus to who was behind this big cat trafficking scheme.
Ed Newcomer, a special agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for over 20 years, led the investigation alongside Smith.
It was Newcomer’s last case before he retired.
He said he rarely busted people for selling jaguars and other similar animals. He did tell the LA Times about a home he raided filled with containers that had snakes jammed inside them. They never saw the sun.
‘When you arrest these people, and they end up in front of a judge, they tell the judge, “I’m an animal lover. I just got a little carried away.” And nothing pisses me off more. They are not animal lovers,’ Newcomer said.
‘They are either in it for the money or they’re in it for the obsession of collecting and owning and having and controlling.’
Newcomer was able to dredge up two other individuals that may have owned the jaguar cub prior to it being abandoned at the Lions Tigers & Bears Sanctuary.
Videos he came across showed a man – identified in court records as A.G. – housing the jaguar at his residence on Lakepointe Drive in Riverside. Another video showed an influencer identified as O.B. posing with the jaguar and an expensive car in the background.
Mathias Tobler, director of population sustainability at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, helped Newcomer confirm that these videos in fact were of Eddie, and not some other jaguar.
‘It’s pretty horrific to see that and to know that that happens,’ Tobler said. ‘People treating him like a little pet cat and passing him around for entertainment.’
A.G. denied knowing anything about the jaguar, despite owning the home on Lakepointe Drive.
Eventually, investigators discovered a man named Hector Gomez, who was renting the home from A.G., was the one who had possession of the jaguar.
Gomez had arrest warrants in Texas and Arizona for allegedly selling drugs to an undercover officer and trafficking marijuana via train between California and Texas.
Gomez was arrested in March 2022, and a witness interviewed by Newcomer and Smith told them Gomez had been planning to kill the jaguar before it got too big.
O.B. eventually told Newcomer about the woman who sold Rahman the cub. She was described as a blond woman who wore a lot of makeup.
Newcomer took that description to a Texas federal agent who was immediately able to make the identification.
‘Instantly he said, “That’s Trish Meyer, we have been after her for years. She is notorious,”‘ Newcomer said. ‘That’s the first time I heard Trish Meyer’s name.’
A federal grand jury returned a four-count indictment against Meyer in October 2022. She was a fugitive from the law for more than a month before she turned herself in.
Among the charges she faced were interstate transportation of an endangered species in the course of commercial activity, interstate sale of an endangered species, trafficking prohibited wildlife species, and trafficking endangered species.
Rahman was charged with all the same crimes except the interstate sale charge.
He was sentenced in July 2023 to a year of probation and was ordered by the court to pay $30,000 in restitution to Brink’s sanctuary.
Meyer pleaded guilty in June 2023 to trafficking endangered species and is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
She could go to prison for five years.
Despite the potentially life-altering consequences she faces, Meyer is still quite active on Instagram.
She still frequently takes pictures with her exotic animals, including a lemur, a white tiger and various birds and cats.
She even did a whole photoshoot to celebrate her youngest daughter’s pregnancy in May of this year.
She is, however, quite clear in her bio that she doesn’t sell animals anymore.
Nowadays, the jaguar known as Eddie is a 118-pound beauty that roams around in his habitat, which features grass, rocks, climbing platforms and a pool.
Eddie lives next to a once movie famous grizzly bear named Rocky and Louie, a lion who was also used in the entertainment industry.
They are three of the more than 60 rescued animals that live on the 142-acre property.
‘It’s their forever home,’ said John Schorman, a sanctuary keeper. ‘It’s a privilege watching all the animals thrive.’
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