Carla Bushnell, 29, from Enfield, Connecticut, had agreed to look after the dog of her next door neighbor after its owner, Andrew Zander, had to go and visit his wife who was in hospital in Massachusetts.
When Mr Zander got a call from Enfield Police in December about the death of his dog, Bandit, he couldn’t believe it. 'I immediately broke down,' he said.
'That dog was not my pet…he was my son,' said a devastated Mr Zander, the dog's owner, upon hearing of his pet's death.
Investigators say Carla Bushnell was responsible.
Ms Bushnell was a family friend and had been given the task to continuously check on Bandit at his apartment.
'There was no reason for my wife or I to have any doubts she would be a good caretaker. She insisted she wanted to take care of them,' Mr Zander explained to NBC Connecticut.
According to police, a postal worker saw mail piling up outside the home in November and became suspicious.
The mailman then looked through the window and saw the dog laying dead on the floor.
An upstairs neighbor was told and the two went inside, using a spare key the downstairs neighbor had given her.
They found the dog was dead along with a cat that had become emaciated.
The neighbor fed the cat and the police were called. The dog hadn't eaten for weeks before it died
Bandit was found lying on his side in the bathroom, near the toilet which had also run dry.
There was a large amount of fecal matter and dried urine in every room of the apartment with no bowls that contained water or food.
An overturned bowl in the middle of the kitchen was dry, as was the carpeted area around it, the warrant obtained by the Hartford Courant says.
A necropsy showed the dog hadn't eaten in weeks and had begun to eat its own feces.
Faced with starvation, dogs will eat their own poop to survive.
A note on a kitchen cabinet addressed to 'Carla' listed things to do in order to care for the animals.
The calendar was still on the month of September.
Carla Bushnell has since been charged with animal cruelty.
Investigators said she was liable because she made an agreement to watch the dog.
The upstairs neighbor told police she had only seen Bushnell 'a handful of times,'
'The dog had been starved for at least a month, but Carla said in her statement that she was there every day,' Zander said.
When investigators talked to Bushnell, she kept changing her story, first telling them old them she had been at the apartment three times a day.
Then she told police she had visited twice a day before retracting that statement and claiming a day never passed without her being there.
Ultimately, she acknowledged the care she had been giving the pets may not have been adequate, given the dog's age and physical condition.
When police called Mr Zander, he was distraught.
'I would have rather seen him pass by old age or hit by a car than to starve to death,' he said.
Ms. Bushnell will appear in court on February 18th.
(Daily Mail - Feb 5, 2014)
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