Carlos Lauro, 76, of Riverhead, was arrested on Thursday after one of his dogs, a one-year-old named Blitzkrieg, was found paralyzed with a gunshot wound to the head laying in a pen on Lauro’s property beside a dead goat, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.
Cops were tipped off after the dog was taken to the VCA Westbury Veterinarian Hospital in Westbury. When police arrived at Lauro’s home, they learned he savagely killed a 6-month-old puppy a month earlier.
Lauro allegedly shot the pup, named Cranky, in the back after he refused to come inside his home. When another resident took the dog back inside the house to treat his wounds, Lauro dragged the dog back outside and shot him in the head, police said.
Police executed a search warrant on the property and found eight other dogs, as well as a “multitude” of pigs, cows and chickens “living in deplorable conditions without access to clean food and water.”
Numerous deceased farm animals — including a baby goat and pig — were also discovered on the property. The nature of their deaths is under investigation.
John Di Leonardo, Executive Director of Humane Long Island, who is assisting in finding foster homes for some of the rescued animals, described the macabre scene.
“It was sick and injured animals living amongst the corpses of their friends,” Leonardo, an anthrozoologist, told The Post Friday night. “Everywhere you looked there were bones or fresh bodies.
There’s hides just strung across the ground, birds torn apart, legs sticking out of the ground — it looks like a warzone over there.”
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