Three adults have been busted for leaving a dead puppy in a pizza box and animals emaciated while living with a nine-year-old boy.
Charles Ashbaker, 38, Kelly Walker, 29, and Douglas Nelson, 47, are accused of starving dogs and keeping dead ones around the Michigan house in ‘deplorable’ conditions.
They were discovered after AT&T workers got to a work site in Flint and found $30,000 in wireless cable stolen, said Genesee County Sheriff Christopher Swanson on Wednesday.
Deputies involved in that investigation got to a home and spotted a cage in the front yard with a dead dog inside, he said. They saw an emaciated dog walking around it and inside the house, another emaciated dog.
Swanson, who shared horrific photos during a press conference, said: ‘If you look a little farther, you’ll see inside the house that these dogs are not the only ones that are being emaciated and hadn’t eaten inweeks and there was no water there.
‘There was a puppy that was alive and another one that was dead in a pizza box.’
The refrigerator was not connected to power and had rotted food inside.
‘Three adults, two dead dogs, two emaciated dogs and a nine-year-old boy,’ Swanson said.
Deputies took the boy to Child Protective Services and saved the two starving pups.
Ashbaker and Walker were charged with killing and torture of an animal and cruelty to animals. Ashbaker faces additional charges of fire abuse and felony firearm possession.
Nelson has been charged with drug possession, theft and resisting arrest.
Ashbaker and Walker are being held on $10,000 bonds and Nelson is being held on a $5,000 bond, court records show. Their relationship to the boy was not immediately disclosed.
The sheriff said the gruesome scenes were shared with the public because criminals who torture animals can easily torture humans.
‘You don’t treat animals this way,’ Swanson said. ‘You don’t treat people this way.’
It comes more than four years after a Louisiana woman was charged with starving her six dogs until their bones showed.
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