MNeedham73
02-20-2007, 09:29 AM
This is just unreal. (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070219dog-electrocuted,1,1974384.story?coll=chi-news-hed)
Personally, if it were me, between grief and anger, I'd be pretty inconsolable.
Laura Mercer sobbed Monday evening in a downtown hotel room, remembering the sounds her beloved dog made in the long minutes before his death.
The dog lay near a fountain at the southern end of Grant Park Saturday evening, yelping and screaming, sounding as though were being brutally stabbed, she recalled.
Instead, Smokey, a Labrador retriever mix, was electrocuted in what Chicago Park District officials are calling "a freak accident."
"I want to know how my best friend of nine years died the most horrible death in front of me," said a distraught Mercer, who was released Monday afternoon from Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She said she felt emotionally unable to return home.
"What if this had been a little kid and it was a 5-year-old who put his mitten on the ground and died? I don't want anyone else to have this kind of pain."
Park District spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner said the dog stepped on an access panel in the ground along a raised asphalt walkway or promenade east of Michigan Avenue, near 8th Street.
An electrical wire within the access panel had shorted out, she said, and when the dog stepped on the panel Saturday evening, he was fatally shocked.
Personally, if it were me, between grief and anger, I'd be pretty inconsolable.
Laura Mercer sobbed Monday evening in a downtown hotel room, remembering the sounds her beloved dog made in the long minutes before his death.
The dog lay near a fountain at the southern end of Grant Park Saturday evening, yelping and screaming, sounding as though were being brutally stabbed, she recalled.
Instead, Smokey, a Labrador retriever mix, was electrocuted in what Chicago Park District officials are calling "a freak accident."
"I want to know how my best friend of nine years died the most horrible death in front of me," said a distraught Mercer, who was released Monday afternoon from Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She said she felt emotionally unable to return home.
"What if this had been a little kid and it was a 5-year-old who put his mitten on the ground and died? I don't want anyone else to have this kind of pain."
Park District spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner said the dog stepped on an access panel in the ground along a raised asphalt walkway or promenade east of Michigan Avenue, near 8th Street.
An electrical wire within the access panel had shorted out, she said, and when the dog stepped on the panel Saturday evening, he was fatally shocked.