Family seeks justice after dogs found dead in Cooper County
PRAIRIE HOME, Mo. (KMIZ)
A Cooper County family is looking for information after their dogs were found dead on the side of the road Wednesday night.
Ryan Bernskoetter said he found two of his labs off Campbell Bridge Road just after 7 p.m. with bullet holes in them. After receiving donations, the family is now offering a $7,500 reward for information about the people who did it.
The dogs were a pair of labs named Huck and Goose. Goose was a yellow lab, that the Bernskoetters owned for the past six years. It was born as part of a litter of dogs that the family owns.
Huck was a black lab that was gifted to Bernskoetter by a friend in June. Bernskoetter said he invested a lot of money into training Huck to hunt waterfowl.
Bernskoetter said that living in a rural area, he could understand if someone was angry at the dogs for being a persistent issue or if they were bothering livestock. However, he said both dogs were well-behaved.
“ I can't even describe how sweet Goose was. Would not hurt a fly,” Haylie Bernskoetter, Ryan's wife, said. “He was scared of my blow dryer.”
“That’s the type of dog that if somebody comes to your house that you don’t know he’d probably just lick them,” Ryan Bernskoetter added.
The family says the dogs have never escaped the backyard, so when he opened his door to let three of them play in the backyard on Wednesday, he didn’t think anything of it. But when he went to check on them just after 4:30 pm. he noticed the backyard was empty.
“One of our males, the chocolate lab, I found him behind the house here about 1,000 yards or a little further and he acted a little weird like something was going on,” Ryan Bernskoetter said.
As Ryan tried to track down the other two dogs, Haylie said she could see Goose from their back deck further down the road. That was the last time she saw Goose alive.
Haylie drove down the road to pick up their chocolate lab Captain that Ryan had found, while he continued to search for Huck and Goose. Armed with a thermal hunting scope, he searched the nearby fields. Two and a half hours after they had gone missing his phone started ringing.
“Right at 7:10 I got a phone call from a friend who was also helping drive around. he said ‘I found your dogs and it’s not good news. They’re both dead,’” Ryan Bernskoetter said.
Upon hearing the news, he drove to see what had happened. When he arrived, he soon realized the dogs were not hit by a car. Each dog had a large hole in the front of their faces, with no signs of road rash.
“They were grabbed by the collar and shot them point black in the eyes,” Haylie said. “We X-rayed them at the clinic where I work, and you can tell it was a different gun by how destroyed their skulls were.”
Deputies told the family that they believed two people were involved. The Cooper County Sheriff’s tells ABC 17 that the investigation is still ongoing. The sheriff, Chris Class said in an email that deputies have been talking with citizens in the area but don't currently have any leads that have panned out.
“It’s just a scary thing to think about there’s people running around our house that would do that to an animal,” Haylie said. “If they don’t care that they did that to a dog what else are they capable of?”
Anyone with information is encouraged to call the Cooper County Sheriff's Office at 660-882-2771.
The family is also seeking donations and says that if the person responsible does not get caught they will donate half of the money raised to Armanis Angels and the other half to Mid-Mo Youth outdoors to get kids on hunting trips in honor of Huck. Donations can be made on Venmo at Ryan-Bernskoetter or PayPal at rbernskoetter18@gmail.com.
