Abused dog found trapped inside nailed-shut dog house in South Los Angeles

SOUTH LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Living under a piece of plastic on 83rd Street and Grand Avenue, Willis Rollins, a homeless man, thought he had seen it all: piles of trash, abandoned mattresses.

Then earlier this week, he spied a dog house left in a lane of traffic. What was inside left him disgusted.

"It's inhumane," Rollins said.

The dog house had been nailed shut. It sat for three days until a curious LAPD sergeant from 77th Street Station alerted a rescue group, Ghetto Rescue FFoundation. When they peered inside, two plaintive eyes looked back.

"He was just cowering in the back. His head was down. He was pushed so far into the wall. It was almost like he was trying to run, but there was nowhere else he could go. He just looked like a defeated dog," said Alison Featherstone, who helped start the group.

The dog is a 3-year-old shepherd-chow mix, a muscular 57 pounds. Video shows the dog resisting an animal control officer, who had to pull hard to remove the dog from his crude refuge. Surprisingly, he didn't nip, much less bark.

"He didn't growl. He didn't do anything," Featherstone said.

His wounds reveal a painful history. His legs were bitten and some of the wounds were infected.

"They actually had to sedate him to shave him and clean the wounds," Featherstone said.

The Ghetto Rescue FFoundation (GRFF) is a coalition of LAPD officers, firefighters and animal lovers who come across so many at-risk animals.

According to Rollins, many abandoned dogs end up on south Grand Avenue. Three weeks ago, he says, he found a pit bull tied to a chain-link fence near his tent.

"It got skinny there, so I fed it. Then a man at the gas station said he wanted it," Rollins said.

A week later, he saw something worse.

"They had a Rottweiler in a basket dead two weeks ago, upside down dead," Rollins said.

Lucky for the dog rescued from the tiny shack, he was found in time. GRFF has given the dog a new name, Walter Worthy Higgins, with emphasis on Worthy, Featherstone says.

"Worthy of love, yes," she said.

GRFF says he'll need time to recover from his trauma. Once rehabilitated, he'll be looking for a home far better than the one he left.