On May 17, Sam Gavin left her home on D Street to help wash the hot rods with the Renegades in preparation for Armed Forces Day weekend and came back to find her basset hound Daisy dead in her fenced in yard, Daisy’s throat slit with no blood in sight. Whoever did this, the act seemed evil and intentional, and in the following month, four or five other residents on D Street have reported their dogs being poisoned.
On June 26, a Hawthorne resident posted to Facebook that her 13-yearold dog Jasper got terribly ill overnight and didn’t know if he had been poisoned or was suffering from old age. He all the sudden quit eating, was bleeding from his genitals, and vomiting, having to be carried into the house. She took him to a veterinarian in Fallon the following day and was afraid he wouldn’t make it.
When she asked the Hawthorne Facebook community, “I would like to know how many dogs in Hawthorne have been poisoned and what their symptoms were,” she got a variety of responses.
“Good luck; ours was poisoned but made it due to getting her into the vets quick enough and she was big. She had some kind of methamphetamine in her system,” the fellow resident said, saying that if her dog Kita was any smaller, she may not have made it.
Another admitted that three of his pets were poisoned as well, one of them ending up dead.
The Mineral County Sheriff’s Office told Jasper’s owner that no one is going around poisoning dogs; that Jasper could’ve had cancer. However, Jasper’s owner made it clear that if she found out who was hurting Hawthorne’s dogs, she would take action and then ironically, her dog has these life-threatening symptoms days later.
One thing is for certain…something is going on with the dogs in Hawthorne.
“My basset hound Daisy was five months old, and we left her outside in a gated fence,” Gavin says. “We went home and opened the gate, and she wasn’t moving, when normally she runs up and greets everyone. My dad went over and said, ‘Daisy’s dead’. Her throat was slit and there was no blood around, anywhere on the concrete or on the other dogs.”
Gavin called the MC Sheriff’s Office to report the incident and asked if they could go to her house to look at the scene because she believed Daisy was murdered, but they in turn told her to bring Daisy to the police station. Gavin didn’t want to do that, feeling it was important for the police officers to see for themselves any evidence that could help with an investigation. They never showed up, and any further evidence (besides a photo that Gavin took after it happened) was lost.
“There are 4-5 dogs on D Street where people are saying they got poisoned. The sheriffs never come down this road, I never see them.”
Jasper died on Monday, June 29, because he was in so much pain. The dog that was perfectly fine last Friday lost his mobility and was gone two days later. Jasper lived on J Street.
After several attempts, Mineral County Animal Control could not be reached for comment before press time.
