It was a day like any other for Nick Kamenjarin when he dropped off his dog Pharaoh at a dog daycare center, but when he returned, his dog was unresponsive and he was left with a lot of unanswered questions.
On the fateful day, Kamenjarin brought in his 3-year-old dog to Playful Paws in Chicago’s South Old Irving Park neighborhood on the northwest side. When he returned to get the dog, however, something was terribly wrong.
“(The owner) came back and said that Pharaoh was not breathing,” Kamenjarin said.
Kamenjarin then raced back to the dog play area at the daycare, initially thinking that his dog may have been choking on something.
“I picked him up, his head fell, and he was completely limp,” he said. “I asked where there was a vet.”
Kamenjarin said that he begged the owner of the daycare to drive him to a veterinarian, but that she refused.
“There was no one else in the facility other than her and she immediately had to call someone to come in to look after the other dogs,” he said.
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By the time they were able to get Pharaoh to the vet’s office, it was too late.
“The vet said that his feet were already cold by the time I got there for emergency measures,” he said.
Now Pharaoh’s owners are left with many unanswered questions about what happened to their dog. They said that the dog didn’t have any health issues and that he appeared fine in a social media post made by the daycare.
“We asked them when the last time was that anyone saw him alive, and they couldn’t provide an answer to that,” Kamenjarin said. “There’s always going to be the question of it someone was there supervising him, would they have gotten him to a vet that’s only three or four minutes away, and would that have changed the outcome for our little Pharaoh?”
NBC 5 made multiple attempts to reach out to the owner of the daycare, but have not received a response.
In the meantime, Kamenjarin said that the family is waiting for the results of a necropsy to determine the dog’s cause of death. Those results will likely come next month.
