Police in Middletown, Connecticut cited an emeritus Wesleyan University chemistry professor with animal cruelty last week for allegedly leaving his dog in a hot car to die.
The professor, 79-year-old David Beveridge, also left another dog to die in a hot car three years ago, according to veterinary records obtained by the Middletown Police Department.
The dog that most recently expired is “Jennie,” a three-year-old Labradoodle.
Middletown police initially opened the investigation into Jennie’s demise after someone reported the dog as missing. (It’s not clear who reported the Labradoodle as missing — or why.)
In any case, police determined that Jennie died in Beveridge’s car on Tuesday.
Beveridge told investigators that he had planned to drop the dog off at a doggy daycare establishment before going to work.
However, the professor allegedly forgot that he had the dog in the car.
Beveridge then proceeded to park his car on a street on the edge of Wesleyan University.
At around 2:30 in the afternoon, Beveridge said, it finally dawned on him that he hadn’t taken the dog to dog daycare. So, he went to his car to check on the dog.
By that time, Jennie, the three-year-old Labradoodle, had died inside.
The Middletown police press release suggests that temperatures reached into the 90s on Tuesday.
According to Weather Underground, the weather on Tuesday in Middletown was partly cloudy with a heat index high of 90.7 degrees.
An animal control officer determined that Beveridge took the dog to a veterinarian after it died.
The veterinarian was “extremely upset,” according to the police report, because Beveridge had previously left another dog — a four-year-old poodle-mix named “Charlie” — in a hot car to die.
Veterinary records indicate that the incident leading to Charlie’s death occurred on May 27, 2014.
A set of Middletown police arraignment reports shows that a police officer cited Beveridge with misdemeanor animal cruelty.
Beveridge’s Wesleyan University webpage shows that his academic specialties include molecular dynamics and protein-nucleic acid recognition.
The professor has a court date on Tuesday.
Wesleyan University — where a single year of tuition, fees and room and board costs $66,970 — is most famous because staffers at a Hartford science museum found graduating seniors having sex in the bathrooms, doing drugs and scaling a very lifelike dinosaur exhibit during an annual event called “Senior Cocktails” in 2013. (RELATED: Pampered College Students Trash Museum During Boozy, Drug-Addled Party)
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