Cook said Zachary and Amber Manning filed a report on May 20 allegedly a group of four or five kids ages 9 to 13 tried to drown their Chihuahua mix Ghost at the Main Street Boat Ramp on May 17, throwing it, holding it underwater, and otherwise abusing it.<\/p>\n
The Mannings alleged that a nearby family rescued Ghost from the children, but that the dog died a few days later as a result of the incident.<\/p>\n
The sheriff’s office released a video<\/a> on June 10 in which Detective Gary Winterstein stood alongside the boat ramp and showed photos of Ghost, seeking the public’s help identifying the juveniles responsible.<\/p>\n Facebook\/Clay County Sheriff’s Office<\/p>\n In her Monday update, Cook said the Mannings avoided investigators for several weeks, until they were finally confronted and admitted the whole thing was a ruse. They said they lied in an effort to convince their landlord, who didn’t allow pets, to let them keep Ghost.<\/p>\n According to veterinarians, the dog died of natural causes, Cook said.<\/p>\n “Our detective Winterstein and all of the detectives in our agency spent hundreds of hours chasing down leads, canvassing the neighborhood, interviewing people, and put a lot of work into this,” Cook said. What they found was a woman who recalled seeing the dog at the boat ramp, and when she mentioned to the owners that she would like a dog just like it, they said they were trying to “rehome” the animal.<\/p>\n Instead of rehoming the dog, the couple concocted the animal abuse story believing it would gain their landlord’s sympathy.<\/p>\n “We put hundreds of hours of work into this. Hundreds of hours of work that could have gone into a real crime,” Cook said. She also thanked Detective Winterstein, whom she said “took quite a bit of abuse online” over the last several weeks as community members voiced their anger over the seeming lack of progress finding the alleged perpetrators.<\/p>\n “People calling, people sending us emails, and Detective Winterstein was oftentimes just taking a brutal public condemnation for not solving this crime fast enough,” she said.<\/p>\n “The two people who concocted this story, we are working with the state attorney’s office now to hold them accountable,” she added.<\/p>\n This story Viral Claim That Kids Tried To Drown Dog In Florida Was A ‘Lie’, Sheriff Says<\/a> first appeared on National Enquirer<\/a>. Follow National Enquirer<\/a> on <\/a>Yahoo<\/a> so you don’t miss what’s coming next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Florida sheriff says her department spent hundreds of hours investigating a viral animal cruelty report that turned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[107475,28,30,29,12830],"class_list":["post-363428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-clay-county-sheriff","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-michelle-cook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"<span](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/national_enquirer_328\/94d7a6ee04f0ae55bf56d58a8512cc73.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n