News of the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa pinged into Sherry Gaber’s cell phone as text messages from friends.
“Do you know about this?” one friend asked, with a link to an article about the discoveries.
Gaber’s heart dropped. The news of Hackman and Arakawa – close friends and clients – was bad enough. But what really sank her soul was the fact that their German shepherd, Bear, had died along with them.
Just five months earlier, Gaber, an animal chiropractor, had run her hands along Bear’s fur, adjusting the animal’s atlas vertebrae, the topmost vertebrae in the cervical spine. She’d cooed the German shepherd and laughed with Arakawa. Bear seemed vibrant and happy, although still slightly favoring a right hip from a surgery a few months earlier. Now, she believed he was dead, found either in a closet or crate or bathroom floor, depending on conflicting news and official reports. The details didn’t compute.
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“I can’t handle that image,” Gaber said in an interview with USA TODAY. “That’s why this whole thing is so distressing.”
“It just doesn’t add up,” Gaber said.
That’s because it didn’t.
Bear wasn’t dead at all. As Gaber read the news reports on her phone, the dog was alive and well, resting at a pet daycare facility in Santa Fe, along with the couple’s other dog, Nikita, a 7-year-old Akita-shepherd mix.
USA TODAY learned the dog who perished in the Hackman home was actually Zinna, a 12-year-old reddish Australian Kelpie mixed-breed who had once trained in agility skills to compete at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Her body was found in a closed crate in the home, according to Joey Padilla, who transported the surviving dogs to his facility, Santa Fe Tails.
Police continue to look into the details and causes behind the deaths of Hackman, 95, and Arakawa, 64. They were discovered in separate rooms in their Santa Fe estate with signs of advanced decomposition, probably from being dead for over a week. As investigators try to establish a cause of death for the movie actor and his wife, their misidentification of Zinna could potentially raise doubts about other parts of their investigation.
In their affidavit for a search warrant, sheriff’s investigators said deputies “continued to search the residence where they then observed/found a deceased brown in color German-Shepard [sic] canine.” Details of the affidavit were reported by the media, leading friends to believe Bear had died.
