Treated Like a Dog

Roy Pike says his dog, Chief, “ran a close second to my kids.” If Pike went shopping, so did the chow. When the family went boating in a nearby lake, Chief came along. During one boating trip, Chief disappeared in the woods in pursuit of a female chow. Every day for the next two weeks, Pike hiked the woods in search of Chief until he found him. So there was no question that Chief would accompany Pike on his drive from their North Carolina home to Kemah for Pike’s construction job.

Last October 25, while Pike was breaking for lunch after installing fire-resistant boards in Landry’s Seafood restaurant on the Kemah Waterfront, he was arrested for leaving Chief in his car. Chief had been there for three hours and 15 minutes with the windows down; Pike had brought him water every 45 minutes. Charged with cruelty to an animal, Pike says he was told he could not retrieve his dog until a ruling had been made in his case. That ruling didn’t come until Monday last week, too late for his dog. Chief died at the end of July from a combination of health problems — including heat troubles — while in the care of the Galveston County Animal Shelter, where he’d been sent, supposedly for his own safety.

Galveston County Assistant District Attorney Kerri Foley doesn’t take lightly charges of mistreating animals. “Anybody will agree that a chow, which is a thick-coated dog, that’s locked up in a car on a day when according to the officer was over 80 degrees outside — and that’s outside where there’s ventilation — that if you leave it for over three hours unattended, yeah, that’s cruel,” she says.

But Pike’s lawyer, Richard Morrison, says that Foley didn’t double-check the officer’s guess that the temperature was in the mid-80s. According to the National Climatic Data Center, October 25 was a partly cloudy day with a northeast wind blowing at ten knots. For most of the afternoon, the temperature was 78.8 degrees, peaking at 80.6 degrees at 1:53 p.m.

“I think this is a refusal to look at the facts,” Morrison says. “[Pike] was giving the dog water in 78-degree weather. Was that cruel? Ask someone who knows something. [Foley] didn’t ask; she relied on some cop about the weather. That makes me madder than hell.” Foley says the county doesn’t usually investigate misdemeanor cases.

A warning, Pike says, would have sufficed. He would have put Chief on a plane bound for North Carolina the next day. The Kemah police officer who arrested him, he says, had no sympathy for the fact that Pike was a visitor who had learned just that morning that the Maple Inn, where he was staying, does not allow pets. The officer refused Pike’s request that he arrest him off the Landry’s property — an action that cost Pike his $60,000-a-year job with that company.

Led to believe he could retrieve his dog after his release, Pike cooperated with police. While Pike was being booked, Chief escaped from a League City police car; officers took him to the site, and Pike helped them lock the dog in a barn. Then he returned to jail.

When Pike was released the next morning after posting a $2,500 bond, Chief was at the county shelter, in a four- by eight-foot pen enclosed by stainless steel and chain-link fencing.

Nine months later Chief died while under the shelter’s care. Shirley Tinnin, director of the shelter, says Chief’s heart stopped en route from the shelter to the vet’s office. The six-year-old dog succumbed to a combination of heartworms, hot spots (skin sores caused by heat) and a tranquilizer administered so that shelter workers could cut the chow’s hair in order to treat the hot spots. In a memo recounting efforts to resuscitate Chief, Tinnin says that she had contacted the district attorney’s office several times about Chief and another cruelty case. “I was wanting to see if the D.A.’s office could move the trial dates up sooner so we could move the animals out,” she says. Not only is a prolonged stay in a pen away from its guardian stressful to an animal, but it also restricts available shelter space.

That the dog died in county custody is simply unfortunate, Foley says. “Dogs can die anywhere. This one happened to die in a kennel.”

Morrison has another conclusion: “She killed the dog,” he says of Foley’s insistence to proceed with the case and detain Chief as evidence.

But Foley says she wasn’t aware of any need to hurry: Morrison, she says, didn’t present any evidence contrary to the police report prior to the trial date.

Pike, though, was doing what he could for Chief — which wasn’t much. He says the court even turned down his request that Chief be shaved for the summer. For people who fussed so much about a dog locked in a car, they didn’t seem to consider what effect the Texas summer heat would have on the same hairy dog in an indoor shelter with no air-conditioning.

Last Monday prosecutor Clyde Burleson dismissed the case after seeing photographs of Chief at home with the Pike family and learning that Pike had been checking on the dog regularly. “After reviewing all the evidence, I came to the conclusion that while I don’t necessarily approve of putting a dog in a car like that, it didn’t rise to the level of a criminal act,” he says.

The dropped charges are little comfort to Pike, who now plans to sue Galveston County and the Kemah police. Pike estimates he has spent $9,000 on attorney fees, trips to Texas for court appearances, loss of work time and interest on his bond. That doesn’t include the decrease in wages he suffered when he lost his job for being arrested at work, which would bring that figure as high as $50,000, Morrison calculates, not including the mental anguish of the Pike family or punitive damages.

Pike is still grieving for Chief. “He didn’t do anything,” Pike says with agitation. “He didn’t bite anyone. He didn’t have rabies. He wasn’t spreading diseases. He was in jail for nine months for doing nothing. He died for absolutely no reason.”

Last Tuesday Pike drove back to Tennessee, where he now lives with his wife and two children. He took Chief’s corpse with him in a cooler surrounded by 14 bags of ice. That night he buried Chief under a tree on his father’s farm.

Asked if he’ll get another dog, he says probably someday, but not anytime soon.

E-mail Melissa Hung at melissa_hung@houstonpress.com.