This dog just had his day.
A beloved pooch sitting on doggy death row for killing a neighbor’s pup was granted a pardon — when DNA testing proved his innocence, according to a report.
Jeb, a Michigan service dog, was in the wrong place at the wrong time last August when Vlad, a tiny Pomeranian, was found dead, according to CNN.
Vlad’s owner, Christopher Sawa, found Jeb standing over his dog’s lifeless body, and he assumed he found his dog’s killer — and convinced a St. Clair Court that this was the case.
“I have no choice except to follow out the state law that the animal would be destroyed,” Judge Michael Hulewicz said in September, the network reported. “I don’t like to do this. I don’t like it at all.”
But Jeb’s owners, Penny and Kenneth Job, of St. Clair, MI, knew there was no way their gentle dog was a murderer, and were determined to have him exonerated. And it’s not just because they loved their dog– they relied on him too. Kenneth, a 79-year-old Air Force veteran with neurodegenerative disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth who uses Jed to help him stand and walk.
The couple requested that testing be done to prove that the DNA found in Vlad’s wound matched his — a procedure with a $416 price tag.
To do this, forensic experts plucked Vlad out of the freezer and swabbed the area where he was bitten, as well as the inside of Jeb’s mouth. The samples were sent off to the Maple Center for Forensic Medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine.
And on October 24, exactly two months after Jeb arrived at animal control, the verdict came in.
“Jeb is not the dog that killed (Vlad),” wrote DNA analyst AnnMarie Clark.
“We were relieved,” Penny told CNN. “We were absolutely relieved.”
Jeb was allowed to go home the week after the DNA results came in.
Vlad’s real killer is still on the loose, officials said.
Kenneth, a 79-year-old Air Force veteran with neurodegenerative disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth who uses Jed to help him stand and walk.
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