A Georgia man was arrested recently after saving a dog locked in a hot Mustang by breaking a window on the car outside an Athens shopping center.
"I've got PTSD, and I've seen enough death and destruction," Desert Storm veteran
Michael Hammons said, according to WXIA-TV. "And I didn't want anything else to happen if I could prevent it."
A group of shoppers originally noticed the dog and called police but, before officers arrived, Hammons used the footrest of his wife’s wheelchair to bust the window. When the car and dog owner returned from the store, however, she was furious and insisted that Hammons be arrested for criminal trespassing.
"We would not have made those charges on our own,” Oconee County Chief Deputy Lee Weems said of the charges against Hammons. “The deputies on scene say the owner of the dog and the car were very insistent that he be charged with criminal trespassing."
The owner, who insisted she was only gone for five minutes, was cited for leaving the dog in the hot car. Weems pointed out that, in 80-degree weather, temperatures inside a car can rise to 114 degrees within 30 minutes even with the windows cracked.
Hammons could face up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine if convicted, but
Weems told the New York Daily News that he doubted a jury would convict the man.
"We didn't want to charge him, but he told us he broke the windows and when you have a victim there saying she wants him charged, we had
no other choice," Weems told My Fox Atlanta.
Hammons doesn’t regret his actions.
"I knew there'd be consequences, but it didn't matter,” he told the station. “Glass, they make new glass every day, but they could never replace that dog."
Twitter users seemed incredulous.
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