LATROBE, Pa. — Patti Levay has been in the pug rescue business since the 1980s. Her love for animals, especially her dogs, runs deep.
She said over the last 10 years, she paid to have at least 11 of her dogs cremated by Patrick Vereb and his company, Eternity Pet Memorials. She thinks the number is probably higher.
“I couldn’t look back any further because my heart couldn’t take it,” Levay told Channel 11’s Andrew Havranek. “My emotions couldn’t take it.”
She always had the dogs cremated by Vereb, but now she’s not even sure if those ashes, which she’s buried on her property, belong to her dogs.
“He saw me crying, he saw my heartbreak, he lied to my face, and I don’t even know if my dogs made it to the landfill or if he dropped them off between here in Latrobe and Pittsburgh,” Levay said. “Did he just throw them alongside the road somewhere? I will never know. I’ll never have those answers.”
She said she can’t even look or hold what should be the ashes of her beloved Harvey because she doesn’t think the ashes are his.
“It’s heart-wrenching because I don’t have that closure now,” Levay said. “I can’t hold those ashes and talk to my animals and talk to my pets like I did before.”
That’s why on Sunday, starting at 6 p.m., she is holding a memorial service at the pavilion behind the Kingston Veterans and Sportsman Club.
A local priest will perform the service, there will be a bubble release, and then a pet cremation specialist will speak and take questions about how a proper pet cremation service should look.
Levay hopes it gives her, and the countless other victims, closure.
“We need someone to talk to someone to answer our questions, we need to talk to each other, we need to listen to each other about our pets,” she said.
Despite all of this heartache, she said she doesn’t hate Vereb, and she prays for him.
“I don’t hate him. I’m not going to let hate into my heart for him because if I let him take one speck of hate into my heart, then that’s a speck of love I can’t give to my dogs, whether living or deceased,” Levay said. “There’s something wrong with a human being who can do this that affects so many people, and he doesn’t have the heart to realize how badly he’s hurt us.”
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