Virginia Officer Convicted of Stealing Lost Dog

The officer said he was trying to avoid the possibility that the dog would be euthanized if not claimed.

Nov. 3, 2011

3 min read

A Henrico police officer who answered a call for a lost dog in June and then took the 4-year-old Labrador retriever home was convicted Wednesday of petty larceny.

Juston Sanudo, an eight-year veteran who resigned from the department after the incident in June, testified that he was trying to avoid the possibility that the dog, Camo, would be euthanized if not claimed.

But Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Heidi Barshinger called multiple witnesses, including a neighbor of the dog's finder, who said he met Sanudo as the officer lead Camo to his patrol car.

"Is that your dog?" Mike Taylor asked.

"It is now," Taylor quoted Sanudo as saying. Sanudo denied making the statement in his testimony.

But the officer also failed to report he had taken the dog home, called off an available animal control officer, and gave conflicting accounts of what dog pound Camo supposedly had been taken to.

"It's a great small-world story," said Jennifer Blanchard, who has owned the chocolate lab since he was 8 weeks old and sent out mass emails through a friend about her lost dog June 14, the day he slipped through a fence off Dumbarton Road.

A high school friend got the email and turned out to be the boyfriend of Morgan Clements, the woman who found Camo wandering in the street in Lakeside and felt so badly for him that she took him home. Then she discovered from the boyfriend who Camo belonged to and an email picture exchange confirmed Camo's identity.

Sanudo, a 31-year-old military veteran, answered the call to police from Clements and when he arrived noticed a baby seat in Clement's car. "Is the dog good with children?" Clements said Sanudo asked. The officer has a 2-year-old child.

Blanchard testified she was suspicious because after she tracked down Sanudo through the police department as the officer who picked up the dog, Sanudo took less than 30 minutes to return Camo to her and he was not wearing a badge. He said he'd taken the dog to Hanover County's pound, which does not euthanize animals.

Henrico General District Court Judge Mary B. Malveaux ordered Sanudo to pay a $150 fine and gave him a six-month suspended jail sentence.

Barshinger praised Clements for taking the trouble to pick up Camo and doing what she could to find the dog's owner.

"The officer could have done a lot of things differently," Barshinger said, noting that an owner has 10 days to claim a lost dog and that Animal Protection supervisors said they would have turned over Camo to Sanudo if he had not been claimed.

Blanchard, meanwhile, celebrated Camo's fifth birthday in July and Wednesday said the lab as been an integral part of her life since she got him. "It was great to see how much work the police did to figure out what happened," she said after court.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service