Dog, Cat Fall From High-Rise Balcony Days Apart
By Chuck Sudo in News on Sep 5, 2013 10:00PM
Police are investigating the death of a dog that fell from the balcony of a downtown high-rise apartment building three days after a cat blew all nine of its lives in a fall from the same balcony.
The incidents occurred at 360 E. South Water Street. A 26-year-old man who only identified himself to the Sun-Times as Ryan said his stepfather, mother and sister from Florida were visiting him. Ryan owned two cats named Ash and Oak; his stepfather brought along a Rottweiler-Shar Pei mix named Duke.
According to Ryan, the cats, who were used to being on the balcony, were just chilling Sunday when Duke peered through the glass door to the balcony and freaked one of the cats. That cat wound up falling over the balcony.
” I guess they freaked out because they never had a dog in their face before and I’m assuming one of them got skittish, went on the edge and just kind of jumped when they saw it through a glass window.”
Duke wound up falling over the balcony around 8:15 a.m. Wednesday. Ryan said no one was home at the time and he was visiting friends, but that he packed some boxes to move out of the apartment and those boxes and some chairs on the balcony “created a ladder that no one was thinking of.”
According to Ryan, his stepfather loved the dog “almost as high up as my mom and my little sister,” flipped when he couldn’t find Duke.
“He was in shock and he was like, ‘Where’s the dog?’ and since this had just happened to the cat … I already figured the worst.”
Police initially ruled the dog’s death an accident and no citations were issued. Ryan told the Sun-Times “they believed what I told them.” According to NBC5, officers investigating a possible case of animal cruelty later said they were treating the deaths as accidents. We can understand why the police put a second set of eyes on the case. One animal falling off a balcony after being scared by another is a freak accident. Two falling to their deaths from the same balcony within days of each other is a coincidence, at the very least. One falling from a balcony by walking a makeshift set of stairs looks a bit sketchy.