OGLETHORPE COUNTY, Ga. -- The house is at the end of a long dirt road in a very rural area of Oglethorpe County just east of Athens.
Walter Keith Sanders said he frequently heard and occasionally saw the dozen dogs living next door.
"Yeah we could hear the dogs at night, howling and barking and it was pretty spooky sounding," Sanders said.
Their health, he says, was less than ideal.
"I had heard that they were rescue dogs so I figured they would look distressed and malnourished. So I didn't pursue it any further," he said,
But the owner of the property did, trying to evict the tenant who owned the dogs. Sheriff deputies made several trips to the house.
TIMELINE
On July 19, deputies escorted the landlord onto the property to notify the tenant of the eviction.
A day later, deputies returned and counted 16 dogs and four puppies on the property. Deputies ordered vaccinations, worm and flea treatments for the dogs, and told the dogs' owner to find new homes for them.
Investigators described the dogs as skinny and covered in fleas.
Evidence pictures before and after the shooting
On July 25, investigators checked in again and counted 12 dogs and three puppies.
"He was trying. He was working on re-homing the dogs as far as we knew. We had no reason to believe he was doing anything else," said Sgt. Megan Coile, an investigator with the Oglethorpe County Sheriff's Office.
On August 9th, after the eviction, a neighbor found dead dogs in the woods behind the house. The tenant had just moved out.
Deputies counted 16 of them, possibly with gunshot wounds. Sgt. Coile had seen the dogs alive just three weeks ago.
Colie said There were 16 dogs spread out in the woods. Some were covered with limbs, some were tossed into briar bushes but all of them were moved away from where they lived.
"We were completely blind sighted," she said.
"This whole situation is very hard to wrap my head around at this point because we were all moving in the right direction, and then this devastating end came to all the dogs."
Sheriff deputies identified the dogs' owner as David Ortiz. He hasn't been charged, but investigators say that could change after veterinarians at the University of Georgia finish conducting 16 necropsies.
Oglethorpe County does not have animal control so animal-related cases are handled by the sheriff's office. Coile said there also isn't a large shelter in the county. They share one with nearby Madison County.
