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A Delano couple is offering a $5,000 reward after someone demanded and received a ransom for their dog. The dog was later found dead, apparently shot, on a nearby lake.
Jason Davis said his 2-year-old Labrador retriever Lou disappeared from their home in December.
Davis and his wife Shanna put up missing posters and enlisted help for weeks to find him, only to have a caller respond and tell them he had the dog. The caller eventually demanded a $1,200 ransom, left on a car in downtown St. Paul.
Davis said they complied, but didn't get their dog back. Until an ice fisherman called him recently and reported finding a dog dead on an island in a lake near Buffalo.
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"We went out there and he showed me where the spot was," Davis said. "Sure enough it was Lou. So I picked him up, of course frozen, kind of dug him up out of the dirt, brushed off the snow, and saw the bullet holes."
Davis said he hopes the reward will bring someone forward who knows what happened to Lou.
"We think with the attention that it's getting, maybe someone will say, 'Jeez, he's going to get caught anyway. Maybe I'll take the five grand and turn him in,'" Davis said.
The Wright County Sheriff's Office and St. Paul Police have both opened criminal cases on the incident, said Davis.
