ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. (WHP) \u2014 The owner of a pet memorial business in western Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to theft by deception after investigators say he dumped the remains of customers’ pets into a landfill before providing customers with the ashes of other, unknown animals.<\/p>\n
Patrick Vereb Sr., 72, who owns Eternity Pet Memorial, took over $650,000 in payments from customers between 2021 and 2024, according to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.<\/p>\n
Over 6,500 customers paid for private cremation services for their pets, Attorney General Dave Sunday said, but they instead received the ashes of other animals.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a pet owner, I know that losing a pet is like losing a family member, and the defendant\u2019s conduct, without a doubt, worsened that pain for these victims,\u201d Sunday said in a release. \u201cNo sentence can alleviate the grief and heartache that has been caused here, but our hope is this felony conviction provides a measure of closure as it involves the defendant taking responsibility and admitting to what he did.\u201d<\/p>\n
The attorney general’s office said it’s received thousands of victim impact statements that it plans to share during Vereb’s sentencing. <\/p>\n
Prosecutors also hope Vereb will be ordered to pay restitution. <\/p>\n
Vereb’s bail was revoked Thursday, and he was committed to prison in Allegheny County. His sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 21, 2027. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. (WHP) \u2014 The owner of a pet memorial business in western Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-314011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}