The PetSmart in East Liberty, Pennsylvania is facing a lawsuit after a dog died, allegedly from strangulation, while getting its nails trimmed at the location.
AJ Ross, a Pittsburgh native and reporter for CBS in New York, told NewsRadio KDKA's Lynne Hayes Freeland that she took her 12-year-old dog, Kobe, to get groomed in November of 2020 because she noticed one of his nails may have been causing him some pain.
"I wanted him to get the nail trimmed and I thought it would be an in and out, very regular process and it was anything but," she explained.
Ross said that when she took her dog to the PetSmart, the employees told her she could not remain inside due to COVID and they couldn't have extra people in the grooming area.
She said she was told the procedure would take abut 10 minutes. She said she left and returned a little early and heard them "paging the managers over the intercom and I got this kind of sick feeling, maybe intuition feeling like something is off. So as I'm in the checkout aisle and talking to the clerk there and I'm asking her 'Is that normal? Why would they call a manager to the grooming area, is something wrong?' and she's trying to assure me it's probably nothing, but then when I walked into the grooming area, I saw Kobe just laying there, lifeless."
She said the employees told her that he just passed out.
Ross said she immediately picked up her dog off the table and ran outside thinking fresh air might help, but as she realized the dog was not waking up, she collapsed and fell off the curb, in tears.
That's when she said one of the managers suggested taking Kobe to a nearby animal hospital.
She said despite the efforts of the doctors at the hospital, it was too late. After about 15 minutes of trying to revive him, doctors told Ross that Kobe was gone.
Ross told NewsRadio KDKA that going to this particular Petsmart was nothing new for her, she's been to there before because it's close to her home in Highland Park.
She requested necropsy be performed on Kobe to determine just what happened.
After returning to PetSmart and again asking the groomers what had happened, she said two groomers told her that Kobe simply passed out. When she asked to watch the surveillance video she was told that they couldn't allow that.
Ross said two weeks after the incident happened, she was allowed to watch the video along with a regional manager for PetSmart that the company flew in. She was told she could not record or have anyone present with her to watch the video.
She described the video to Lynne saying "I could see that he was harnessed by two different leashes on the grooming table that were extending, hyperextending his neck in two different directions. And it made zero sense why he was even harnessed that way in the first place. And as they're clipping his nails, all four of his paws are suspended, so his entire body weight is resting on his neck alone. He's literally being strangled, flailing about, tortured. And for almost a minute, more than a minute, they let this happen to him," she said, fighting back tears.
A lawsuit was filed on Friday naming the two groomers and the two managers of the PetSmart in the suit. After doing some research, Ross said incidents like this have "happened far too many times at PetSmarts across the country - that perfectly healthy dogs go in for a grooming procedure and they're either significantly hurt or they pass away or they're killed, I should say."
Ross says she doesn't want this to happen to anyone else's pet and that there has be to accountability an transparency with PetSmart's training practices and their oversight.
She remembers Kobe, who was named after basketball star Kobe Bryant, as "such a fun-loving, energetic, protective little dog who had a very big personality. He probably had that Napoleon complex that a lot of little dogs have where they think they're bigger dogs."
