A Queens, New York, woman is in tears after her dog was shot and killed by a stray bullet that flew through her parents’ bedroom window and struck her beloved pet.
Lisa Murena, 36, of the Howard Beach section of Queens, tells Inside Edition Digital she had “so much love” for her Pomeranian-Husky mix she named Arya.
“She was the smartest dog I knew. If I went to the laundry room, which is where we kept her treats, if I was doing laundry, she would wait patiently thinking I was going to give her a treat,” she says.
Murena says that she and Arya were “so attached. Every night she slept with me,” adding that they often slept together in the downstairs portion of her parents’ home.
Murena got Arya four years after a friend of a friend was getting rid of the pet and couldn’t care for it anymore.
“I saw the pictures on Facebook and I said, ‘I have to have her,’ because she was just gorgeous. And then, for four years, she became the pain in my rear end,” she jokes.
While Arya might have found clever ways to get under her owner’s skin, their bond was unbreakable, so during the early morning hours of April 22 when the unthinkable occurred, Murena can’t stop getting emotional over it.
“My brother was up at 1:30 in the morning. He heard glass shatter in the bedroom, and then he heard Arya whimpering on the couch. Then I woke up because I heard my brother say, ‘Arya, why are you crying? Arya, why are you bleeding? Why is there so much blood?,’” she recalls. “We didn’t hear any gunshots. We didn’t hear anything. Then, we all woke up. My dad and I took her to the emergency vet and they did the x-rays around 3:45, the x-rays came back and the doctor’s like, ‘There’s a bullet in her.’”
Over the weekend, as the whole Murena family mourned the loss of Arya, police arrested 18-year-old Joshua Marte and charged him with criminal possession of weapon-loaded firearm, criminal possession of a weapon-ammo clip and reckless endangerment aggravated cruelty to animals.
The Queens District Attorney’s Office tells Inside Edition Digital he has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Marte’s attorney Joseph Nohavicka tells Inside Edition Digital in a statement, “we are still analyzing the facts as they pertain to Joshua, and we will have a better sense of our defense strategy when we see the indictment, which as of [April 29], we have not seen.”
Murena, who never met Marte and says he and his family have been living on the block for just two years, says she got a restraining order and wants nothing to do with him.
The bullet-sized hole in her parents’ bedroom window serves as a reminder for Murena and her family of what happened and what could have been.
“My dad sleeps less than a foot away from where the bullet went through the window,” she says. “I had just gotten up from that side of the bed around 11 p.m., 11:30 p.m. because I was laying next to my mom and we were talking and on the phone and whatever, but that could have been me. He could have paralyzed one of us. I don’t know anything about guns, nor do I care to know anything about guns, but the society that we’re living in, there’s way too many shootings, way too many going on. Whether it’s kids, adults, dogs, any kind of animal, it’s just way too much now. I can’t take it.”
