Dog theft allegation hounds mayor

The mayor admits she kept a neighbor’s dog.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

ALICE, Texas — Politicians have been known to pull some doggone dirty tricks, but can it get more low-down than puppy theft?

That’s the question people in this Texas brush country town are asking now that their mayor has admitted — without a smidgen of remorse — that for months she’s been harboring Puddles, her neighbors’ cuddly Shih Tzu.

At first, Mayor Grace Saenz-Lopez lied to the family, telling them that the dog had died while they were vacationing. Now she’s refusing to return the pooch, which she calls Panchito.

She argues that the dog’s owners have forsaken the right to keep such a tender animal because they failed to shower him with loving care when he was ill and needed them most. That’s triggered a bizarre custody battle that has both sides howling for sympathy.

“I’ll tell you what: Let’s drop that dog in the middle of the courtroom and see who it goes to first,” the mayor’s lawyer, Homero Canales, barked in a fit of bravado. “You want a dog? Take care of it. These people were more interested in going on vacation than caring for a dog that looked like it was about to die.”

The Puddles-Panchito feud started last summer, when Rudy Gutierrez and Shelly Cavazos asked Saenz-Lopez to dog-sit their sickly black and white pup while they took their four children to an amusement park. Puddles had gotten trapped under their home weeks earlier, and by the time he emerged had been ravaged by fleas. He was deathly ill when the family decided to go away, Gutierrez and Cavazos admit.

After one day, the mayor called them with terrible news: Puddles was dead.

“We broke the news to the kids on the way home, and they cried,” said Cavazos, 37. “Everyone was very upset.”

It was easy to believe, given the dog’s condition — but by small-town happenstance they learned it was a lie. On Halloween, Cavazos’ aunt went to a local groomer to scout a potential breeding partner for her Shih Tzu; she was struck by the male dog’s uncanny resemblance to Puddles. Then it hit her: It was Puddles.

“I asked who the owner was, and the groomer said Grace Lopez,” the aunt, Sylvia Trevino, recalled.

The news that the mayor had faked a dog’s death and then secreted it away set tongues wagging in this town of 19,000 people about 45 minutes west of Corpus Christi, where the motto is “Alice is ‘Buena Gente.’” Translation: “Alice is good people.”

Few seem to be buying the mayor’s sad-dog story. A pack of protesters hounded her during a council meeting this month, carrying signs comparing her to Cruella de Vil, the villain in Disney’s “One Hundred and One Dalmatians”. A banner headline in the Alice Echo News-Journal barked, “The Shitzu hits the fan.”