South Carolina: Heather Sutton, 21, leaves puppies inside 100 degree car while at Olive Garden

SOUTH CAROLINA -- A 21-year-old woman is facing charges after police say she left two puppies inside a hot vehicle to eat inside a Rock Hill-area restaurant Friday afternoon.

According to a Rock Hill Police report, officers were called to the Olive Garden along John Ross Parkway Friday afternoon, just before 5 p.m.

When they arrived, they found two people sitting with puppies underneath a tree. The people said they had walked past a vehicle and heard the puppies, estimated around six to eight weeks old, making a “screaming sound” from under the passenger seat of the vehicle.

The people told officers they waited ten minutes by the vehicle and believed the puppies were near death, so they reached through a cracked window to unlock the vehicle and pull the puppies out.

Police say it was 95 degrees outside at the time, and well over 100 degrees inside the vehicle, saying there was “no shade whatsoever over the vehicle.”

Officers found the woman who owned the vehicle inside the restaurant and identified her as 21-year-old Heather Sutton. Sutton told police she’d been inside the restaurant for about 30 minutes and left the puppies in a box on the passenger seat.

“This meant that both puppies climbed out of the box and crawled under the seat in an attempt to find shade,” the officer wrote in the report.

Sutton was arrested under two counts of ill treatment of animals and taken to the Rock Hill jail.

(WNCN - Aug 1, 2016)