She bought a NorCal Victorian, and then found a mass dog grave next door

Jennifer Raymond waited until the dead of night to make her move. On April 12, the animal welfare advocate pushed through thick brush and cut a hole in her Fortuna neighbor’s fence, trespassing with one goal: to uncover the truth about the animal rescue next door. 

She searched the property, home to Miranda’s Rescue, until she found the earthen mound she was looking for and began to dig.

“Within about a foot and a half, I came up with fur,” Raymond said. “I uncovered a dead dog. Its muzzle was covered in blood.” 

The shocking discovery at Miranda’s Rescue set off a chain reaction that led Humboldt County sheriff’s deputies to investigate “credible” allegations of felony animal abuse, animal cruelty, fraud and conspiracy. Roughly two weeks after Raymond dug into the grave, they raided the Fortuna property. 

Even after that raid, the rescue remained open and continued housing animals, bewildering community members. In early June, animal advocates rallied at county council chambers demanding justice. Other locals jumped to defend Shannon Miranda, the rescue’s owner, calling the situation “nothing short of a lynch mob” and pointing out he hasn’t been charged with a crime. Miranda, who did not return numerous SFGATE requests for comment, denied the allegations in a now-deleted Facebook post and later said on his website that media coverage has created an “inaccurate picture” of the rescue operation.

Then, less than two months after the first raid, investigators returned.

This time, they were joined by the FBI on-site, along with forensic veterinarians and Cal Poly Humboldt anthropologists to excavate the property for additional buried animals. Within hours, Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal was speaking to reporters on the edge of the property, confirming additional dead animals had been exhumed, with records showing that more than 700 animals remained missing. The bodies of 117 dead dogs have been found so far.

The incredible numbers have left shelters across Northern California questioning if they have sent hundreds of dogs to their untimely death in Fortuna. Oakland Animal Services Director Joe DeVries, whose shelter had sent hundreds of dogs to Miranda’s Rescue since 2016, fears the apparent mass grave discovery was only the beginning.

“We just don’t know. That’s the tip of the iceberg,” he told SFGATE. “We don’t know how big that iceberg is.”

Last year, Raymond, founder of the Humboldt Spay/Neuter Network, used money left by her late mother to buy the Victorian home next door to Miranda’s sprawling Fortuna property. She didn’t buy it for the large square footage or the view. She was trying to investigate rumors that had haunted her for nearly 20 years: why some dogs sent to Miranda’s Rescue were never seen again.

“[Miranda] was everybody’s sweetheart as far as animal rescues go,” Raymond said. “But there was always something that had happened that he no longer had the animal within a few weeks of getting it. He’d be taking these big dogs, and they’d simply disappear.” 

Living next door, she hoped, would finally allow her to find out what was happening behind the rescue’s fences.

“When the property next door to the rescue came up for sale, I was the first one in line,” Raymond said. “I told myself, ‘This is the way to find out, because I will be right there.’” 

Raymond moved in, and her suspicions only deepened. From her second-story window, Raymond said she saw dogs rotate through the rows of outdoor kennels every few weeks. She could hear dozens of dogs howling at all hours from day to night. On a phone call with SFGATE on May 21, the sound was constant and overwhelming.  

“There are probably 70 of them right now,” Raymond said while standing outside her home and holding her phone toward the cacophony. 

Raymond said she frequently saw new animals coming to the property. Occasionally she would text Miranda about specific dogs she could see from her house, asking if she could visit them. She said he often avoided her requests, telling her the animals were dangerous or unadoptable. 

The dogs then began vanishing without a trace. 

While Raymond was watching from next door, a Solano County shelter volunteer named Sabrina Woods started raising similar questions about Miranda’s operation from over 250 miles away. She told SFGATE she noticed dogs, including a husky-German shepherd mix named Kane she’d been “very fond of,” seemed to disappear after being transferred to Miranda’s Rescue. 

“I just kept hearing how quickly the dogs were being adopted, and I never saw any adoption advertising,” Woods explained to SFGATE. “It just didn’t add up to me. [If] Solano couldn’t adopt out these dogs … how was this little place doing it?”

Around the same time in April, Raymond and Woods unknowingly began filing nearly identical public records requests to shelters statewide, seeking contracts, transfer numbers and payment records tied to Miranda’s Rescue. 

“One of the shelters called me and said, ‘There’s somebody else asking for the exact same information,’” Raymond said. “That’s how Sabrina and I met.” 

Together, the records painted a troubling picture. “We were only able to find 53 verifiable adoptions through all social media accounts during the entire year of 2025,” Woods wrote in a fact sheet she shared with shelters and investigators.

For Raymond, the breaking point came when she saw a new mound of dirt, sticking out oddly like a sore thumb, on the edge of Miranda’s property.

“I finally decided I had to break the law to find out,” she said. 

On April 12, Raymond said she trespassed onto Miranda’s property and dug into what she described as a mass grave. She shared her photographs of a carcass with local attorneys and animal rights advocates, but they advised her that the photographic evidence wasn’t enough for law enforcement to immediately spur action. 

Determined to gather more evidence, Raymond, with the help of her friend Jenna Moore, set up motion-activated trail cameras overlooking the mound, hoping to catch Miranda in the act. On April 26, the cameras captured Miranda using a tractor to move dirt around his shelter. That night, the pair returned with shovels, headlamps and a micro-chip scanner from Raymond’s spay-and-neuter clinic.

Working under the cover of darkness, Raymond said they dug into the mound and pulled five dog carcasses from the grave before dragging them back to Raymond’s property. The women said the dogs were still warm to the touch and actively bleeding with bullet holes in their heads. They scanned the chips and began tracing dogs from shelters statewide. 

“Two of the dogs were 3-month-old puppies. They still had their baby teeth and had come all the way from Palm Springs. They both had holes in their heads,” she said, a discovery that left her heartbroken.

The discoveries quickly reached shelters across the Bay Area, including Oakland Animal Services, which had been contacted by Humboldt County sheriff’s investigators on April 27 regarding its relationship with Miranda’s Rescue. The following day, Woods called DeVries and shared her and Raymond’s findings: a compilation of public records data, transfer numbers and police records. Woods also shared the data with law enforcement and later SFGATE. 

“Pretty quickly, the math didn’t add up,” DeVries, the Oakland shelter director, recalled to SFGATE. 

According to Woods’ findings, Miranda’s Rescue had received over a thousand dogs in the past three years — from an estimated 12 to 16 organizations, including organizations in Oakland, Berkeley, Solano County and the Central Valley.

On April 30, the animal welfare advocates met with DeVries to show him the microchip and photographic evidence. One microchip matched Zora, a dog beloved by Oakland Animal Services staff who had struggled to find her forever home; Zora had been transferred to Miranda’s Rescue weeks earlier.

“[It] was just a total gut punch,” DeVries said. “We’ve definitely used a lot of Kleenexes in this building in the last couple of weeks.”

According to the affidavit, Oakland shelter operations manager Melinda Tierney told investigators Zora had been transferred to Miranda’s Rescue less than a month earlier and had no behavioral or health issues. On April 25, days before investigators first searched the property, Miranda allegedly texted Oakland staff a photo of the dog on a leash with the message: “Zora adopted.”

Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Detective Julian Aguilera later wrote in an affidavit reviewed by SFGATE that Miranda later admitted that he was “guilty of lying,” saying he had euthanized Zora after the dog allegedly killed a cat and bit him.

DeVries said Oakland immediately halted transfers to Miranda’s Rescue after reviewing Raymond’s evidence and began reviewing records. When DeVries confronted Miranda the next day in a phone call, Miranda claimed to have euthanized five recently transferred dogs.

“Literally off the top of his head, he had a reason why he had euthanized five of them,” DeVries said. “When I checked with my transfer coordinator, four of the five he told me he euthanized, he had told her that he had adopted out.”

Authorities were also growing increasingly suspicious. On May 1, investigators executed a search warrant at the property, seizing firearms, adoption records, electronics, and the bodies of eight dogs, some with apparent bullet wounds to the head, according to the affidavit. Aguilera wrote in the affidavit that he believed Miranda “murdered these dogs” to financially benefit from taking in additional shelter animals. Investigators estimated in the affidavit that the rescue operation received roughly $510,000 through intake of dogs and care payments from California shelters and affiliated nonprofits, while Oakland alone transferred 445 animals to Miranda’s Rescue between 2023 and 2025. 

SFGATE’s repeated attempts to reach Miranda to share his side of the story have been unsuccessful, but the May 1 affidavit offers some insight into his response. Miranda denied killing and dumping the eight dogs when interviewed by investigators April 27, according to the affidavit. After being shown pictures of the deceased dogs found, investigators wrote that Miranda began to cry and said he did not own those dogs and they were not buried at his rescue. He reportedly told detectives he was “not truly a no-kill shelter” and said he generally used veterinarians for euthanasia but would occasionally shoot animals himself when “immediate action was required to prevent further suffering.”

The allegations have since fractured the local community. 

Multiple police departments and regional rescues have stopped sending animals to the rescue, including the Ferndale Police Department. In a phone call, Ferndale police Chief Ron Sligh told SFGATE his department canceled its decadeslong contract as soon as the investigation started.

“My family, we adopted a cat there a few years back,” Sligh said. “This has been a shock. They advertise as a no-kill facility.” 

As investigators continued their work, community frustration mounted over the lack of public updates or criminal charges. Roughly 25 people spoke up against Miranda during an early June Humboldt County Board of Supervisors meeting about the case, and about 100 people later attended a vigil outside the courthouse. While most speakers called for Miranda’s Rescue to be shut down, a smaller group defended Miranda, with supporter Hilary Graham describing the backlash as “nothing short of a lynch mob” and warning against a “rush to judgment” before charges had been filed, according to Jefferson Public Radio.

For nearly two months after the first highly publicized raid, the sheriff’s office declined repeated requests to update the public. “Due to this being an active investigation, we are not releasing any information,” spokesperson Erin Inskip told SFGATE in a June 9 email. 

Miranda denied the allegations in a since-deleted May Facebook post, writing: “Many of you, like me, have been appalled by allegations we’ve read in the media and online. …  A legal process is now underway to sort the facts from the lies, and I’m asking you to please hold fire until that process works its way through.”

So far, the only formal action taken outside of the criminal investigation has been a review of Miranda’s Rescue’s operating permit after officials found longstanding permit requirements dating back to 2003 and a 2019 modification had never been completed. The rescue broke its silence on June 18, updating its website to say “We do not euthanize animals simply to make space.”

Miranda wrote in a June 18 statement on the Miranda’s Rescue website: “These were not decisions made lightly and were based on my responsibility to protect both the public and the animals in our care.” 

The investigation escalated on June 23, when Sheriff William Honsal announced investigators had returned to the property, bringing with them the FBI, United States Department of Agriculture, California Department of Justice, California Attorney General’s Office, forensic veterinarians and Cal Poly Humboldt anthropologists to excavate the property for additional buried animals. Hansal said over 730 animals were still missing and possibly dead.

A county news release published later in the week confirmed that 117 dead dogs had been exhumed, with an additional 21 canine skulls and hundreds of other bones found. Many of the animals showed signs of bullet wounds, and over 600 dog collars were located nearby.

The search warrant for the second raid, obtained by SFGATE, provided more information about the alleged killings. Miranda acknowledged euthanizing dogs himself, telling investigators he sometimes shot “up to 10 dogs a month” with a .22-caliber rifle, according to the June 15 warrant. Multiple former volunteers and employees told investigators dogs were routinely taken to what they called “the ranch,” a private area near Miranda’s home, and were never seen again.

Using ground-penetrating radar, investigators expanded the excavation over several days. By June 25, crews had exhumed dozens of animal carcasses from multiple pits while a refrigerated truck waited nearby to preserve the remains as evidence, according to the Times-Standard. Forensic veterinarians conducted preliminary necropsies at the scene, photographing the animals and scanning them for microchips. As they continued searching additional areas of the property, the Times-Standard reported that crowds of community members gathered outside the rescue each day to watch the excavation unfold. Authorities have yet to release an official recovery count or announce any charges. 

Raymond said the latest raid was an “affirmation,” but after months of pushing for accountability, the hardest part now is the waiting. 

“It is very hard to wait, not knowing what is really going on,” Raymond said. “But at this point, that is all we can do.”