Kimberly Freeman never expected to spend her weekend searching the woods for her dog’s body.

 

“This needs to be considered a crime,” Freeman said.

 

On Friday, sometime around 4 p.m., Freeman was chatting with her neighbors while their dogs were playing.  Nothing out of the ordinary. 

 

“Then I saw them go in to my woods right back there and I made a comment ‘Oh, they just went in there,'” she said. “I continued to talk. Less than five minutes later I heard a very loud gunshot from that direction. Like a bullet the one dog came running out and I expected my dog to come.”

 

Freeman searched the woods, but her dog, Diamond, never came out. 

 

“I thought maybe the case was the dog ran off and someone would see it, but after almost 4 or 5 days with no sightings, it was looking grimmer and grimmer,” said Cindy Viehdorfer of Happy Valley Animals in Need.

 

Pet organization pitched in to help look, post flyers, and door knock.

 

“Everybody feels your pain when you lose an animal, when you’re missing an animal,” Viehdorfer said. “Everybody wants to help.”

 

Freeman called police, but didn’t get anywhere.  Then, a call came Monday.  Diamond’s body had been found four miles away.

 

“She didn’t deserve this,” Freeman said.

 

It happened on posted property, but the PA Game Commission said that does not mean hunters will not sneak in to hunt.  Friday was bear season, and Diamond is a black lab mix. 

 

“I feel there’s this attitude in the community that says, ‘Well, it’s hunting season. This happens,'” Freeman said. “I cannot accept that.”

 

Freeman said she will not stop until she finds out what happened.  “Unfortunately I lost my husband to cancer in 2015, and I moved to the country, ’cause I always wanted to live in the country, and I got Diamond to be my companion to help fill part of the void,” she said. “Now somebody’s taken her from me.”

 

There is a reward being offered for anyone who might have any information on what happened in the woods along Greenhouse Lane in Philipsburg.