A Police Dog Died in a Hot Car, Lieutenant Responsible for Caring for Him Is Charged

K-9 Horus died of heat exposure June 20

Shortly before 6 p.m. on June 20, the lieutenant allegedly contacted his Missouri police chief to say that his K-9 partner who had served an overnight shift with him into the early hours of the morning was dead.

The Savannah police chief later determined that K-9 Horus had allegedly been left in the police vehicle – outfitted with special K-9 precautions that had seemingly been switched off – since the end of their shift at 4:49 a.m. shift, according to the Sept. 5 probable cause statement reviewed by PEOPLE and which cites the Andrew County Dispatch Log.

Horus died of heat exposure, which was “directly” connected to the deactivation of the vehicle’s AceK9 system designed to protect him, per the charging documents.

Lieutenant Daniel R. Zeigler is charged with one count of misdemeanor animal abuse, following an investigation by the Missouri State Highway Patrol outlined in the probable cause statement and officer’s report to the prosecuting attorney.

That June 20 evening, a neighbor saw the deceased police dog in the yard by the vehicle and later told investigators that Zeigler was “flipping out,” per the probable cause statement, which goes on to describe the distraught lieutenant as “yelling in disbelief,” claiming that he “thought he had brought the K-9 in at the end of his shift.”

Sometime later, Chief Dave Vincent, drove up to the lieutenant’s home.

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At Horus’s burial later that night, another witness said that he heard the lieutenant tell the chief that the K-9’s death was his fault, per the probable cause statement.

The temperature at the Kansas City International Airport – the nearest weather reporting station which is just shy of 50 miles away from Savannah, Mo. – recorded a high of 88 degrees that June afternoon.

Six days later, investigators conducted a functionality test on the Savannah Police K-9 vehicle the lieutenant had used. In the testing process, investigators parked the vehicle outside in direct sunlight with the ignition turned off.

As it was designed to, when the internal temperature of the vehicle shot up to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the vehicle’s horn blared repeatedly in alarm, the rear windows rolled down and a fan activated.

“This test demonstrated the AceK9 system inside the Savannah Police K-9 vehicle was in working order and would have had to have been manually turned off/deactivated on June 20, 2024,” Highway Patrol Officer Justin S. Johnson writes in his probable cause statement. “The deactivation of the AceK9 system directly contributed to the death of K-9 Horus by removing a safeguard to prevent such an incident.”

Zeigler, who was then a lesser-ranking sergeant, trained with Horus when the nearly 2-year-old German Shepherd joined the force in February 2021. Following an eight-week training, they were slated to be "on the streets" that May, according to a Facebook post by the Savannah Police Department, announcing the purchase of the dog through community donations.

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