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An animal rescue group is calling for an investigation after a pit bull who was adopted two weeks ago died from what animal advocates believe was physical and sexual abuse after being found injured in South Los Angeles on Monday.
The 5-year-old dog, Cargo, was dumped in front of a house on the 200 block of West 85th Street in the Florence neighborhood, according to Dianty Marquez of Ghetto Rescue Ffoundation, an Anaheim Hills-based animal nonprofit associated with police in the great L.A. area.
A resident who wished to remain anonymous said neighbors reported seeing two African-American men who "dropped it off there and just left." The woman said she couldn't get ahold of any city or county animal control officials to respond, so she reached out to Ghetto Rescue.
Video Marquez took when she arrived at the scene shows the pooch was clearly suffering. "Can you feel this?" Marquez is heard asking as she pets her.
"Head down, she had a rope tied to her neck and she wasn't going anywhere," Marquez told KTLA.
Marquez was able to get Cargo into her car and rushed her to emergency veterinary care.
"That's when we got word that there had been some trauma in her vaginal area," Marquez said, "and they made her as comfy as they could."
But by Tuesday morning, the pit bull had taken a turn for the worse. "She passed because she had some type of blunt force trauma and it caused her aorta to rupture," Marquez said.
"We come across a lot of different abuse cases and it's definitely one of those I'm not going to forget," Marquez said. "It's going to stick with me."
In a Facebook post about the ordeal, the rescue said Cargo hadn't suffered any scraped or abrasions, and "other than her vagina trauma nothing was obviously wrong."
"The only thing we can be thankful for is she did not die on the sidewalk alone," the post states.