(WWJ) Angelica Stewart of Dearborn Heights can barely get out a complete sentence through her tears.
The pets she thought of as her babies, both of them, are gone. And it doesn't make sense.
Stewart says she was home with her 2-year-old daughter when the small child opened the screen door and her dogs ran out. She raced after them, but they were fast with sudden freedom and disappeared.
She drove around for awhile. Then she posted in Facebook groups and started calling animal shelters.
Eventually, the next day, she got a hit at the Taylor Animal Shelter. But the news was grim.
They did have two dogs who came in together as a pair. Dead dogs.
They were collected off the freeway after numerous people called to report they saw a man in a black truck stop on the freeway and throw them onto the busy roadway, Stewart said.
The dogs were hit and killed. Their remains were at the shelter if Stewart cared to come and identify them.
She's having a hard time getting over the sight of their bodies -- destroyed by traffic -- and the knowledge of what happened to the dogs she raised from birth.
"They ran out my front door and then they were just gone," she said, gulping through sobs. "I went to Westland Humane Society, I called Taylor Animal Shelter ... They said they had multiple calls saying a guy in a black truck threw them...
"Why? Why would anyone do this?"
Her dogs were Malachi, a mixed rottweiler and Australian shepherd, she's had since the day he was born; the other was Apollo, a 5-month-old black German Shepherd mix, who looked like a floppy-eared Labrador retriever.
"I watched him (Malachi) come out the womb, the other one (Apollo) I had since he six weeks old," Angelica said.
She's hoping for some kind of justice, though officials say they have nearly nothing to go on.
"We have very little on this, what we have this is a driver saw this black vehicle and a person with some dogs running loose onto the freeway," said Taylor spokesman Karl Ziomek. "Whether that person let them loose, whether they got loose, who knows. Our PD dispatched an animal control officer out there, by the time the animal control officer got there there was no person, and two dead dogs."
He added there wasn't any plate reported, and there weren't any identifying features listed. No one stopped to wait for police after striking the dogs either.
Is it possible the dogs could have run onto the freeway and the person in the truck was uninvolved -- or even stopped to help?
"Given the call, it seemed like the dogs and the person were together on the freeway," Ziomek said.
Anyone who witnessed this or has any further information should could call the Taylor Police Department at 734-374-1420.
