ohmidog!

The roomate of Andrew David Thompson, the former medical student accused of killing 13 Italian greyhounds, said Thompson told her the first one “kind of strangled itself in its sleep.”

When the next two died — both, like the first, also named Kensington —  Chelsea Grimes says she became suspicious.

Grimes testified today during a preliminary hearing in East Lansing, one of two jurisdictions in which Thompson faces charges of killing a series of Italian greyhounds.

Grimes said Thompson, 24, sent her a cell phone photo of the first Kensington, but that by the time she moved in, on Labor Day of last year, the dog was gone.

Thompson, she testified, said he’d wrapped the dog in a blanket before going to sleep. “He said the dog had kind of strangled itself it its sleep.”

Grimes, a veterinary medicine student at Michigan State University, said she found the first death peculiar, the Lansing State Journal reported today. When two more Italian greyhound puppies disappeared that month under unusual circumstances, she grew more suspicious, and at one point searched his room.

In earlier testimony (see the video below), Ingham County Animal Control Deputy Jodi LeBombard testified, Thompson, said he killed the first puppy by slamming it against the wall. He said he was angry because the dog had urinated in his bedroom.

Thompson, who has been suspended by Michgan State University, was ordered to stand trial on charges he killed or tortured three Italian greyhound puppies in East Lansing. He faces up to four years in prison if convicted of those charges.

He is charged with killing ten more dogs in Mason, while living in a different apartment. A preliminary hearing in that case is set for next week.

Andrew Thompson, a Michigan State University medical student charged with killing 10 dogs, now faces three more charges.

The new charges also pertain to killing dogs, bringing to 13 — or 14, by some other media accounts — the number of canines the student is alleged to have killed in his apartment, WILX reported.

The 10 dogs he was initially accused of killing were all Italian greyhounds.

Few details have emerged about the case.

Investigators say Thompson had been bringing the dogs to his apartment over the past nine months, where the crimes were committed. A concerned neighbor, who saw the dogs arrive but never saw them again, tipped off authorities.

Thompson was suspended from school on June 23. He’s currently being held on $100,000 bond.

In our post on the killings yesterday, we remarked the official statement the university released about the case seemed a little odd, specifically this part: “The alleged actions do not reflect the values of MSU or the ethics of the medical profession.”

We’ve gotten more comments disputing whether that’s odd than we have comments of concern about the murdered dogs, or about the scant few facts of the case that have been made public.

While the medical and veterinary schools at MSU haven’t exactly led the way in using alternatives to live dogs in their teaching and research — it was just last year that the vet school stopped using “terminal surgery labs,” in which live dogs are killed after being used to practice surgery — we’re not saying there is any connection between the ex-student’s alleged acts and the school.

But we will say this: Police and prosecutors owe the public some information about what’s going on.

The search continued yesterday for Gollum, a small Italian Greyhound whose owner died trying to save him and her other two dogs from an icy pond in Texas.

Police say the other two dogs and their owner, Andrea Benua, drowned in the pond Monday.

Gollum is believed not to have dronwned,but he disappeared after the accident. Benua’s family and friends are trying to find him, they say, because it’s what Benua would have wanted. Benua and her husband had no children, only the dogs, WFAA in Dallas-Fort Worth reports.

Benua frequently donated to animal shelters and her friends and family asked that anyone wishing to honor her memory do the same.