You’d think that by now people know that leaving your dog in a car during the summer is a death sentence. Yet, these stories keep coming up day after day.
Recently, a woman in Alabama was charged with animal cruelty for exactly that. She left her dog in her car for 7 straight hours on July 4. This was on a Walmart parking lot and there were even signs about leaving dogs in cars all around her. As you would expect, the poor dog died.
“Ultimately, I killed my dog,”
That’s what the 34-year-old dog owner Stephanie Shae Thomas said at a press conference the next Friday. “I can’t change that. I want to, but I can’t.”
Concerned passersby spotted the 7-year-old rescue pitbull boxer named Sky and they called the police. It was a very hot day in Alabama and the car’s windows were rolled all the way up. Several people even tried to break the glass while waiting for the police but couldn’t manage.
“She was breathing very heavily and when you would tap on the door window, she would kind of move her eyes towards you,” says Stacy Guthrie after witnessing the horrific accident. “I just don’t understand, there are warnings out there and you think everyone knows not to leave their animals in the car but they still do,”
The police arrived at the scene as fast as they could, but the dog had stopped breathing by then.
Onlookers kept helping by giving ice for the dog to lie in and trying to resuscitate her, but it was too late.
Stephanie Thomas admitted that she is a longtime drug addict with bipolar disorder. What’s more, she recently ran out of her medication.
“Just thinking about what she went through the last moment’s she was alive… She had to be waiting for me to come out there and help her,” she said. “And I didn’t.”
