117 Dog Remains Found at Miranda’s Rescue During Multiagency Investigation

“ This investigation is far from over,” Sheriff William Honsal said in a statement to KQED. “It is now just beginning.”

The sprawling investigation was prompted by two local animal advocates, Jennifer Raymond and Jenna Moore, who entered the rescue property at night and exhumed the bodies of eight dogs, including one they were able to trace back to an Oakland shelter.

Oakland Animal Services Director Joe DeVries said Shannon Miranda told the shelter that the dog had been adopted. In May, the sheriff served a search warrant and seized firearms and ammunition, as well as a laptop, a phone, a hard drive and physical files from the property.

More than 900 dogs have been transferred to the nonprofit Miranda’s Rescue from shelters around the state since January, according to the sheriff.

Miranda, the rescue’s owner, collected fees ranging from $400 to several thousand dollars per animal, but Honsal said his office has only been able to confirm that 116 of those dogs were adopted.

On Thursday, the mobile command center and heavy equipment brought in to excavate the site were driven off the premises, and the white tent used for animal necropsies was dismantled. Investigators also recovered “a lot of skeletal remains,” according to the sheriff, which were reviewed on-site by a forensic veterinarian.

Most of the dogs were microchipped, the sheriff said, which will allow investigators to track where the animals came from. “ We’ll be reaching out to those people that have provided us chip data to try and match up animals with previous owners,” he said.

Moore runs a Facebook page for people seeking information about animals they surrendered to the rescue. While she hopes the recent search will provide answers for some, she said there are still “over a thousand dogs missing and over a thousand people wanting an answer.”

In the northern part of the field, investigators found the remains of additional dogs, according to Friday’s press release. They began excavating, but “due to the advanced stage of decomposition, investigators on scene, in consultation with the prosecution team, determined that the evidentiary value of removing the animals from the ground was not justified.”

The investigators documented the location and reburied the remains, “leaving the animals in their final resting place,” the press release said.

Two officers from Sacramento County Animal Services were also at Miranda’s Rescue on Thursday.

They had driven nearly five hours to serve legal demands for the return of animals “wrongfully transferred from Bradshaw Animal Shelter to Miranda’s Rescue, the preservation of evidence, and notice of intended legal action,” according to an email from the agency’s public information officer Brittani Peterson.

A statement on the shelter’s website said it severed ties with Miranda’s Rescue in March 2025. But since then, three dogs “were transferred through third-party rescue organizations without our knowledge or authorization,” according to Peterson. Peterson declined to identify the third-party organizations.

One dog has been successfully recovered, and Peterson wrote that the agency will “continue to pursue every available avenue to recover” the other two dogs.

Moore, along with other local animal advocates, plans to hold a second public vigil on Saturday in front of the courthouse in Eureka.

“We will not stop,” Moore said. “ If anything, we’re just gonna get more fierce.”