Police in Alexandria arrested an employee of Your Dog’s Best Friends yesterday, on felony animal cruelty charges.
The groomer, Kevin Sanders, is charged with one count of cruelty for the death of a dog in his care and four misdemeanor charges for alleged abuse of other dogs. He was working at Your Dog’s Best Friends, a dog day care and grooming facility in Del Ray, until his arrest yesterday, according to a press release by the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria.
The charges are the result of a six-month-long investigation conducted by the Alexandria Police Department and the Animal Welfare League after they received a tip from a former employee of Your Dog’s Best Friends, about the alleged cruelty.
Megan Hess, the director of engagement at the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria, said the organization is contracted with the city to take reports of animal cruelty and abuse. In this case, the organization collaborated with Alexandria police to obtain evidence after the former employee reached out in December 2024.
According to the press release from the Animal Welfare League, the former employee provided investigators with initial video evidence of alleged animal cruelty by Sanders, leading to the seizure of more than 600 hours of video footage in early 2025. Last week, a grand jury certified charges against Sander and issued a warrant for his arrest.
He was charged with one felony cruelty charge in the death of a dog named Abigail last summer. The dog’s owners did not file a complaint against Your Dog’s Best Friends at the time of Abigail’s death, because they were unaware of its circumstances, according to the press release from the Animal Welfare League.
Your Dog’s Best Friends declined to comment on the charges against Sanders but posted a statement to its social media pages about the incident written by owner Paul Haire.
In the statement, Haire wrote that a “young golden retriever in Kevin’s care for grooming died while on the table from what a vet confirmed was a heart attack” and that the vet told the facility, “she was certain the dog had succumbed to a congenital heart defect.”
The statement added that Sanders struggled to control the dog immediately before the heart attack and broke protocol by not taking it off the grooming table. “That struggle, while not rising to the level made in the accusations against Kevin, may have caused the dog enough stress to pull the pin on the ticking time bomb.”
In the statement, Haire said that after the incident Sanders was retrained, adding that the facility received no other complaints or reports about how they treat dogs either before or after that incident.
According to the press release by the Animal Welfare League, a previous complaint was filed against Your Dog’s Best Friends in 2021, but an investigation found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing. Animal groomers, like animal-boarding facilities, are only subject to inspection if a complaint is filed, Hess noted.
These kinds of reports can be scary for dog owners. The Animal Welfare League of Arlington has a list of questions that people can use to evaluate whether or not a facility is safe for their pet.
“The main point that people should know is that they are responsible for asking these questions, that there is no oversight or licensing with some of these facilities,” Hess says. “So it is completely incumbent on the pet owner to ask questions, and if they’re not getting the proper answers, to consider other options.”
