Seventeen dogs died of heat exhaustion overnight at a Phoenix-area pet boarding service, after one of the dogs chewed through electrical wires and shut down the air conditioning Friday, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office said Monday.
A criminal investigation of the Green Acres boarding facility in Gilbert, Ariz., is underway, but the deaths appear to be a "tragic accident," Brandon Jones, a spokesman for the Maricopa County sheriff's office, said.
One of the dogs apparently chewed through an air-conditioning power cord in the Green Acre boarding facility, located near Greenfield and Queen Creek roads, where the dogs were staying overnight, leaving the rest of the pets to die of heat exhaustion when the cool air stopped circulating, USA Today reported.
Green Acre workers had last checked in with the dogs at 11 p.m. Thursday and returned Friday 5:30 a.m. to find a large number of the dogs dead and others on the brink of death, said Chris Hegstrom, spokesman for the sheriff's office. The dogs were immediately taken out in the back and sprayed with water to cool them off.
However, 17 of the dogs died and were piled up inside a shed, Hegstrom added. Although dog owners were contacted Saturday morning after owners of the facility returned from Florida on Friday evening, they claimed to have initially been told that their pets had escaped the facility.
"I said is there anything I can do? Oh no we have four cars out looking and I'm like well I can't just sit here, I need to get out. So I was driving around looking and I thought well I should just go over there and see what's going on, maybe they came back, and I pulled up to the two dead dogs in the driveway," said dog owner Jill Cary.
Doug Hart was looking for his sister's dogs and was told the dogs had run away after the air conditioning went out. "My mom and all these people have been driving around looking for their dogs for two hours to find out the dogs are dead in the shed," he said.
"They're all piled up in the shed and Remington is one of them. My husband's being deployed in a month and both dogs are supposed to be my security blankets when he's gone," said dog owner Heather Wicker.
No charges had been brought against Todd Hughes, the owner of the facility, or his family as of Monday morning, but Hegstrom said there will be a follow-up investigation. "It doesn't end here," he said.
Maricopa County Animal Care and Control spokeswoman Melissa Gable warned against jumping to conclusions until the Sheriff's Office completes its investigation because there still are a lot of unknown details that could shed further light on the situation.
