Monica Lopez wanted her dog to live.
Her German shepherd was accused of biting two people and, with other dogs, killing a cat. Denver Animal Protection officials wanted to euthanize the dog, named Lightning, because they felt he was too dangerous to live. Lopez fought in Denver County Court for months, hoping to prove Lightning wasn’t dangerous and should be returned to her.
In April, Lopez pleaded guilty to four municipal crimes: failing to comply with the city’s potentially dangerous animal protocols, keeping a dangerous dog and failing to license and vaccinate the canine. At sentencing, Judge Renee Goble ruled Lopez wouldn’t go to jail, but she would lose ownership of Lightning. Animal protection officials would decide the dog’s fate.
That likely meant euthanasia. Lopez and her attorney gave it one more shot. They filed a motion to reconsider, asking the judge to send Lightning to a specialized animal sanctuary. At a June 2 hearing, Goble expressed frustration with the ongoing litigation, a transcript shows.
“Municipal courts operate with limited resources, and those resources exist to serve our public and all litigants who appear before this court,” the judge said, according to the transcript. “They do not exist so that parties can repeatedly relitigate matters and come in here just because you disagree with what we decided.”
The judge said that since the April sentencing, she’d watched a trial for Lopez’s partner, the owner of a second dog involved in the attacks, and that the evidence in that case, before a different judge, had convinced Goble that she’d been too lenient in sentencing Lopez.
“It’s you. You do not know how to take care of an animal,” the judge told Lopez.
She re-sentenced Lopez to 90 days in jail and ordered that Lightning be euthanized that day.
“This court is deeply troubled by the conduct that has occurred throughout these proceedings,” Goble said. “The volumes of filings, the repeating attempts to relitigate issues that have already been settled, the overhand handling of matters that have already been raised. I am — I — I don’t even know what I’m going to do about that part because right now, Ms. Lopez, my job is to punish you. Your dog’s getting killed today and you’re going to jail.”
The case illustrates the stakes of Denver’s dangerous dog prosecutions, an oft-unscrutinized area of law enforcement that sits at the intersection of the city’s animal welfare, public safety and court systems. For dogs, the cases are life or death. For owners, the proceedings can cost thousands of dollars and land them in jail. For animal protection officers, the wrong decision could mean someone gets hurt.
Yona Porat, Lopez’s attorney, believes the judge’s 90-day jail sentence was illegal because it was handed down at a reconsideration hearing — at such hearings, Porat argued in court filings, judges are allowed to reduce sentences, but not increase them. After the judge imposed the sentence on June 2, Porat immediately sought to delay the judge’s order that Lightning be killed and moved to challenge the jail sentence.
Lopez spent the night in jail. She couldn’t sleep.
“All I could think about was my dog being euthanized,” Lopez said.
The next morning, Goble granted Porat’s request that Lightning’s euthanasia be delayed pending their appeal. But it was too late. City officials had already killed the dog.
Now, Lopez’s partner, Danielle Gallegos, is facing her own sentencing for dog-related crimes on July 8 — and Lopez is hoping the couple can still save their second dog, Thunder.
“They never gave us any kind of answer as to why they couldn’t re-home them to the sanctuary,” Lopez said.
A history of complaints
Melanie Sobel, director of Denver Animal Protection and the Denver Animal Shelter, responded with a single word when she heard from one of her employees that Goble had sentenced Lopez to serve 90 days in jail and ordered Lightning to be euthanized that day.
“Beautiful,” she wrote in a text message, released to Porat as part of an open records request.
In an interview with The Denver Post, Sobel said she used “very poor choice of wording” in her text.
“It was an expression of immense relief that this dog wouldn’t have to sit in a cage for eight months, which it had been,” she said. “…My comment was not celebrating the euthanasia of an animal or this individual being arrested, but simply the completion of this case we had been waiting on for eight months.”
Denver Animal Protection officials took custody of Lightning and Thunder in October, after they escaped their yard in the city’s Sunnyside neighborhood, along with a third dog that Gallegos and Lopez were dog-sitting.
The three dogs ran loose in the neighborhood, then ran up to a woman who was walking by and bit her in her lower back, causing shallow scrapes and bruising, according to an affidavit filed against Lopez. The dogs also attacked a cat. A witness described the three dogs “playing tug of war” with the cat, which was mortally wounded, according to the affidavit.
The dogs’ attack that day was not the first incident involving Thunder and Lightning.
In 2019, animal protection officers cited Gallegos for failing to neuter the two dogs. In 2021, animal protection officers responded to the couple’s home for a reported dog attack — in which no one was injured — and cited Lopez for failing to license and neuter Lightning.
In 2022, the two dogs got out of Gallegos’ and Lopez’s yard, and a neighbor brought them back home. As the man opened the gate to return the dogs to the yard, the dogs bit him on both legs, the man reported to animal protection officers, resulting in minor punctures and superficial scrapes, according to an affidavit.
That 2022 attack meant Lopez had to register Lightning as a — a legal designation in Denver that triggers additional safety restrictions for the dog, including that the German shepherd wear a muzzle when out in public and that the owner must put up warning signs. Lopez was cited in September 2025 for failing to muzzle the dog, court records show. Gallegos was also cited in 2004 for leaving an aggressive Rottweiler in the back of a pickup truck.
Lt. Josh Rolfe, with Denver Animal Protection, told The Post that the couple at times tried to hide their dogs from city officials and at one point used different names for the canines. He noted the couple’s lengthy history with animal protection.
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“Our goal, in general, is to keep animals in homes when we can,” he said. “We have a decade of demonstrated history where we kept these animals in this home despite repeated incidents with the owners and a real lack of collaboration with them. Yes, we are here today, but it is after a decade of history.”
Lopez and Gallegos maintain that Thunder and Lightning are not dangerous, and that the bites were out-of-character attacks prompted by particular stressful circumstances.
During the most recent court proceedings, Lopez presented evidence from an expert based in Florida, James Crosby of Canine Aggression Consulting, who opined that Lighting’s bites caused such minor injuries that he was not particularly dangerous.
“Dogs the size and conformation of the dogs allegedly involved here that did not have proper and safe bite inhibition and control could have, even in a single engagement, easily torn and/or avulsed substantial tissue and inflicted far more damage,” he wrote in a report. “In my professional experience and training, this shows that any dog(s) that inflict this limited force of their bites are no more likely to inflict serious or severe injury than any dog(s) with a recorded minor previous bite.”
The couple also collected letters of support for the animals, including one from the man who was bitten in 2022, who said the dogs were “always friendly and would lick our hands” when he visited with them while they were behind a fence, and that he did not want to see the two dogs euthanized.
On the day he was bitten, he’d had an argument with his wife and believed the dogs “sensed my anger and became defensive,” the man wrote in a May letter. He urged authorities to consider other options besides euthanasia.
The woman who was bitten in October told animal control officers the dogs were “unsafe” and should be euthanized, according to an affidavit.
Lopez, who was released on bail, plans to appeal her 90-day jail sentence. She said Lightning loved playing hide-and-seek, swimming and playing fetch.
“He was a great dog,” she said. “I didn’t think he deserved to be euthanized.”
When Lopez and Porat found a specialized dog sanctuary that was willing to take Lightning after her April sentencing, the option seemed like a perfect fit, Porat said. They were encouraged when Goble granted a hearing on their motion to reconsider — a request she could have just denied without calling everyone back to court, Porat said.
Goble did not return a request for comment on her ruling.
“The litigation was just coming from, for Monica, a completely selfless place — she wasn’t saying she wanted to get her dogs back, she was just saying she wanted the dogs to live,” Porat said. “She thought allowing them to go to a sanctuary was a good outcome for everyone involved.”
The idea did not receive support from Denver Animal Protection. Sobel said the shelter has a duty to keep members of the public safe from dangerous dogs and that dogs can be mishandled at or escape from sanctuaries.
“We strongly disagree with dangerous dogs going and living their life in a cage for the rest of their life,” she said. “…That is not a life for an animal to be in a kennel for the rest of its life. That is not something we advocate for.”
‘Due diligence to protect the public’
Denver Animal Protection euthanizes animals only if they are past the point of medical help or are dangerous, Sobel said.
The city’s shelter euthanized 18% of all dogs it received in 2025 — nearly one in five. That is tied for the highest percentage of dogs euthanized among Colorado’s top 10 busiest dog shelters, according to statistics collected under the state’s Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act.
Sobel said the rise in euthanasia has coincided with a big jump in the number of animals the Denver shelter handles annually in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. She noted the city shelter, as a safety-net facility, accepts all animals, unlike some other shelters, which can turn aggressive animals away. Comparing euthanasia rates between shelters doesn’t reflect differences in intake policies or animal populations, she said.
“I have every confidence in my staff that they are looking at every animal as an individual and making an assessment on that animal that is fair with the resources we have and the space we have at the shelter,” Sobel said. “We are only euthanizing if there are concerning behavioral issues or medical issues that we just cannot address because of our resources.”
Between 2019 and 2025, the number of owners who surrendered their pets to the Denver shelter to be euthanized nearly tripled, shelter statistics show, jumping from 124 surrenders in 2019 to 469 in 2025.
Sobel attributes that trend to the rising cost of veterinary care, noting that some owners cannot afford to pay for end-of-life care. Animals are also coming into the shelter in worse shape simply because medical issues festered when owners could not afford to take their pet to the vet, she said.
Sobel noted that it was the judge in Lopez’s case who ordered Lightning be euthanized, not a decision made by the shelter, and that such cases are complex and difficult for shelter staff and volunteers.
“The last thing I want is for an animal to be euthanized, but again, we had a responsibility of public safety and liability if these animals were to again attack, and there was a victim and we didn’t do our due diligence to protect the public, we are liable,” she said.
Thunder, the second dog, is still being held at the Denver Animal Shelter and will remain there through Gallegos’ sentencing on July 8, at which point a different judge will decide its fate.
“I am hopeful Thunder would have the opportunity to have his life be saved,” Lopez said.
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