Dog Beach Pet Cemetery Desecration?
by Bob Edwards
Call it coincidence, call it synchronicity, call it just freaking weird!
What are the odds that on the Sunday of this long Halloween weekend I would stumble upon the weirdest, most macabre Ocean Beach story ever?
I was next to Robb field, walking with some companions along the flood control channel and noticed two uniformed SDPD officers walking ahead of us. I asked one of my friends:
“Have the cops started walking a beat over here or do you think they’re responding to a complaint?”
All photos by Bob Edwards.
We watched the officers leave the paved path and step down to where the native plant restoration area is and as we walked by we heard fragments of their conversation with a soft spoken individual who we could not see as he was blocked by the shrubbery.
One of the officers asked the man:
“Do you know this is a dog cemetery?”
We could only make out a mumbled, unclear response from the guy he was talking to. We could hear the officer ask:
“Did you dig up a dog here? Why would you dig up a dead dog?”
My first thought was “Ick!” My second was, “What the fuck?!”
I wanted to hang around and see what developed but my companions were equally weirded out by the officer’s comments and wanted to continue our morning walk, so we left.
Nearby, dozens of people were playing with their dogs and a few surfers were braving the blown out surf, all unaware of the shakedown occurring just a few hundred feet away.
As we walked on, we speculated about this brief moment of strangeness. Who knew there were pets buried by Dog Beach? Did some weirdo purposely or inadvertently dig up a pet grave? Why does some poor cop have to deal with this sort of thing on a Sunday morning?
The whole thing haunted me later last night so I went by this morning to check out “the scene of the crime”.
I walked off the path to where the officers had been talking to the man. There were two grave markers flanking a three foot by six foot hole, about two feet deep. There was a homeless guy crashed out nearby. He said the graves have been there for years but he hadn’t heard anything about a disturbance there recently.
Just another day in the life of the alternate universe that is Ocean Beach.
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