Crowd demands justice for Otto
By JEFF STITT
jstitt@yourmvi.com
A crowd of around three dozen “Justice for Otto” protesters flooded the Washington Township supervisors meeting room Wednesday.
And, another two dozen people were left standing in the parking lot because they couldn’t fit inside the packed room.
They were there to demand police Chief Bruce Tooch update them on a case involving the death of a 3-year-old German shepard, Otto, who was “violently killed” in the township in February.
Paul Zuro of Washington Township said his fiancée, Holly Miller, let their two dogs outside around 9 p.m. Feb. 25. Otto and Molly, a 12-year-old golden retriever, chased a group of deer to the top of the family’s property. Molly eventually came back, but Otto didn’t. The couple spent hours searching and calling for the dog, but decided around midnight to continue the search in the morning to avoid disturbing their neighbors.
By dawn the next day, Zuro said he was back at it.
“I just kept calling and calling and calling,” he said. “But he never came.”
When the sun came up, Miller saw Otto in their upper field covered in blood. He said it appeared that Otto was shot.
The family and police were able to follow a blood trail through the field to a neighbor’s patio, which led Washington Township police to investigate the incident. Those neighbors are identified by Tooch as Michael and Vanessa Zadrozny.
For months, the Justice for Otto group has demanded to know why no one has been charged in the case.
Police have been telling the group at supervisors’ meetings that officers were awaiting the results of a necropsy report before charges could be filed.
On Wednesday, during a public comment session where people talked and yelled over one another for nearly an hour, Tooch said the results from the necropsy performed on Otto’s body at Penn State’s main campus in State College revealed Otto died of a gunshot wound inflicted with a shotgun. He said the necropsy also revealed that the blood on the rocks outside of the Zadrozny home “was not human blood.”
He said the necropsy report did not distinctively verify that the blood was a DNA match for Otto, but did reveal “that it was the blood of an animal,” Tooch said, adding that the department did not specifically request a DNA test.
On Wednesday, the protesters also wanted to know why the lead investigator in Otto’s death, officer Robert Cunningham, is no longer handling the case.
Despite a television news station report, Tooch said Cunningham was not suspended from the job. A part-time officer, Cunningham was removed from the schedule May 24 after Tooch learned Cunningham hadn’t requested a new search warrant to specifically extract information and data off of two cellphones that were recovered from the Zadrozny home. The cellphones were confiscated after the first search warrant was executed at their home the day after Otto was found dead. That warrant did not give permission to extract the data from the cellphones.
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