Woman Apologizes for Puppies in Hot Car

ROCK HILL, S.C. – It reached 96 degrees in Rock Hill Friday. But police say 21-year-old Heather Sutton still left two puppies inside her van, in the parking lot of an Olive Garden in Rock Hill. Good Samaritans saved the puppies; more on them in a moment.

First, Sutton. She was arrested and charged with two counts of ill treatment to animals. She bonded out of jail. We went to her Rock Hill home Monday. Her fiance answered the door, and said Sutton didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to speak on camera, either, but he wanted WCCB to tell you that Sutton is sorry for what happened and that her decision to leave the puppies in the van was a ‘mistake.’

He says they had just gotten the dogs the day before.
He says they are animal lovers and that Sutton wants to be a veterinarian.

You might be at a loss for words right now, like Flo Vetro was.”I just don’t understand it. How anyone can be that…?,” Vetro says, while trailing off and shaking her head.

Vetro and her daughter were in that Olive Garden parking lot Friday and heard those puppies crying. Someone else called the police. She and her daughter waited ten minutes. And then took action, reaching in through a cracked window, unlocking the van and opening a door.

They pulled the dogs out, and then Sutton walked out of the restaurant. Vetro said, “She didn’t seem to act like she’d done anything wrong. She said ‘I took them inside but they wouldn’t let me have them in there. I had to take them out.'” WCCB News @ Ten anchor Morgan Fogarty asked, “So she initially thought she could bring the dogs into a restaurant? OK. And that the second best option would be to leave them in a hot car?” Vetro replied, “Apparently. And she admitted to the officer it had been about 30 minutes.”

Rock Hill Police Captain Mark Bollinger says if you ever see a kid or pet in a hot car, call 911 first. And then, he says, “South Carolina created a law last year, that’s a Good Samaritan law, that you can break out the car window to rescue the animal or child inside.”

The puppies were seized by York County Animal Control. They are doing well. We are working to find out if they can be adopted. Sutton will be back in court in September.