HUNTSVILLE – Jenna Gonzales had an instant connection with her dog Tank.
“I jumped out of my car because he almost got hit, and I’m like, ‘oh, my gosh!’” she recalled. “He just runs full speed (and) jumps in my arms and starts licking me.”
Gonzales rescued the pup and brought him home to her family.
“I said, ‘oh, I’m going to call you tank while you’re here,’” Estalla McCoy, Jenna’s mother said.
One day turned into several months.
“Tank was not just a dog, he was my son and my best friend,” she said.
Now, her family is missing one of their own.
“It was gruesome. It was traumatic and it just looks like... unlike anything I’d ever seen,” Gonzales said.
She says it happened while visiting a relative’s home in Huntsville.
“I was house sitting,” Gonzales said.
On Thursday night she let Tank out and when she went to check on him he was gone.
“We started calling his name but I didn’t even make it to the stop sign when I saw the body in our yard,” she said. “It was not there whenever I went the first time.”
She said he was bruised, bloody, whipped and shot.
“I closed his eyes for him and I just held him close because I knew it was the last time I would ever hold him again,” Gonzales said.
The Walker County Sheriff’s Office said it’s an ongoing investigation. They canvassed the neighborhood looking for a lead on Monday.
“Who could have done something so atrocious,” Gonzales questioned.
The area is rural and investigators said there’s no surveillance video, which is leaving Gonzales and her mother now pleading for justice.
“Every part of my soul hurts,” McCoy said.
“He’s gone and the way he went out no one should ever have to go out,” Gonzales said.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Walker County Sheriff’s Office.