They Found What?! Elderly Couple Arrested After Traffic Stop Leads To Horrific Discovery

I was perusing the internet yesterday when this headline from the Las Vegas Review-Journal jumped off the screen at me, "51 guinea pigs found in car, elderly couple arrested in Nevada."

Wait, what?

They found what? And where? And (most importantly) why?

If you haven't seen the story, I'll summarize. Police pulled over 79-year-old Timothy Miller and 72-year-old Carolyn Luke for a broken tail light (which is police code for they suspected something else was amiss, but needed a  legal reason to pull them over).

When Miller rolled down his window, the stench of animal feces, death and urine nearly overwhelmed the officer,

“Our officers knew right away that something was wrong,” Lt. Thomas Healing of the Boulder City Police Department said in a statement.

The police department had received a tip earlier about unknown persons driving around the city (located southwest of Las Vegas by the Hoover Dam) with a possible animal cruelty situation.

What officers found once Miller and Luke exited the vehicle was unbelievable. There were a total of 51 guinea pigs and rabbits inside the car. Eleven of the 51 were already dead, though the great circle of life showed that several of the live animals were pregnant with future pigs and rabbits.

And as it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg.

“The female suspect was concerned about other animals that they said were at their home and a hotel in Las Vegas, and immediately notified Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department,” Healing said in a statement included in the news release.

Officers then found 30 dogs (10 of them already deceased) at a hotel room rented by the couple, plus 15 more dogs and many more guinea pigs at the couple's home in Las Vegas.

The couple each faces 11 misdemeanor charges of torture, injure, abandon or starve an animal and may face charges in connection with the animals found in Las Vegas.

Trying to digest this story into something that makes any sense is pretty much impossible. I've been trying for two days now.

I don't know how long they've been a couple or if they have any children (for all that is holy, please let there be no children!), but something went wrong in their brains somewhere along the way.

How could they let this happen? What good could they possibly think they were doing? How did anyone not notice what was going on before last week?

One thing I've learned after all these years: Sometimes the news just doesn't make sense.