FORSYTH COUNTY, Ga. — Lam Hoang and his fiancé, Eden Nguyen, last saw their dog alive just before leaving their home to head out to dinner Friday night. They returned later that evening to find their 4-year-old mini pinscher mix, “Sonny,” unresponsive and laying in a pool of blood.
“My first reaction was there's probably another animal in here, so I cleared out the entire house to make sure there was nothing that could harm not only us, but our other dog as well,” said Hoang.
Shortly after discovering the house was safe, Hoang began to examine Sonny’s body. That’s when he noticed a small puncture wound on the right of his chest.
“I brought Sunny down into the garage, then I started to assess the blood trail to see where it led, it started right in the middle of the yard there, and I thought that was very unusual because I did not see any sticks that had blood on the tip indicative of a puncture wound.”
His fiancé, Nguyen couldn’t bare to see her dog in that state. “I stayed downstairs the whole time because I could not see my dog like that, motionless.”
The next day, Lam and his fiancé decided to take Sonny’s body in for a post-mortem x-ray. That is where the veterinarian confirmed that there was a bullet inside of the dog's chest. The couple decided to call the police.
Once authorities arrived from the Forsyth County Sherriff’s Office, Hoang took Deputy Velia to the scene in the backyard where the trail of blood started. The deputy determined that it was most likely for the shot to have from the back deck of a neighboring home. That home belonged to Carlos Garcia-Lopez who was later arrested shortly after admitting to shooting the dog with a pellet gun.
According to reports, Garcia-Lopez told officers that he did not intend on killing Sonny, but that he was attempting to shoot at the fence in hopes of stopping the dog's excessive barking.
“We would pass each other coming in and out of the house, and we would exchange pleasantries, he was the last person we would have suspected to have done this,” said Hoang of his relationship with the neighbor.
Now the family plans to bury Sonny in his favorite place, the backyard where he liked to play with his ball. “Pretty much everything that we did, we integrated him into our lifestyle as if he was our son. He was part of our family. You can't find another dog like that,” stated Nguyen.
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