LEXINGTON - A roaming pack of dogs mauled a former University of Georgia professor and his librarian wife to death on a dirt road in Oglethorpe County last weekend, investigators said Monday.
An autopsy done at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Crime Lab in Decatur showed that dogs killed 65-year-old Sherry Schweder, a UGA bibliographer known on campus as Sherry Allen, Oglethorpe County Coroner James Mathews said. Her husband, Lothar Karl Schweder, 77, a former German professor at UGA, died from similar injuries, Mathews said.
"It positively came back that it was a brutal dog attack as the cause of death," he said.
On Monday, animal control officers from Madison County - Oglethorpe does not have an animal control department - rounded up a dozen or so dogs suspected in the attack from a neighbor's house at the end of the road where the couple were mauled, Oglethorpe County Sheriff Mike Smith said.
Authorities are in the process of determining what to do with the dogs.
"We got a court order from the Superior Court here to capture the dogs," said Smith, who added that he planned to meet with District Attorney Bob Lavender to discuss whether any charges will be filed against the owner.
"I've been working in Oglethorpe for 30 years, and I've never seen anything like this," he said.
The two apparently were attacked in sequence on Howard Thaxton Road, just a few hundred yards from their house on Georgia Highway 77 about two miles northeast of Lexington, according to the account Smith gave.
Sherry Schweder, who often would take her pets along the road, had gone out for a walk sometime late last week when she got attacked, he said.
Smith believes her husband, worried that she had not returned home, took the couple's Honda sedan and drove down the road looking for her. The dogs attacked him when he found her and got out of the car, Smith said.
Their bodies lay on either side of the road next to the car before visiting Jehovah's Witnesses found them Saturday morning.
Authorities said little during the early stages of the investigation. "We did not know what we had at first because the bodies were so mutilated," Smith said. "We wanted to thoroughly investigate what happened."
Investigators traced the dogs, of mixed breeds and various sizes, to a house farther down the dead-end dirt road, Smith said. The owner no longer lives in the house but visits every other day to feed the dogs, he said.
Lanier Bridges, who lives across Howard Thaxton Road from the Schweders, said he has seen the dogs up by his house only once - earlier on Monday - and that they did not seem aggressive.
"I just hope these dogs are the right ones," Bridges said. "We're all wary out here in the country right now."
Friends and colleagues said both had a lot of cats and dogs, and also adopted strays.
Nan McMurry, director for collection development at UGA Libraries, called Sherry Allen's command of language "quite extraordinary." She ordered books in most Western European languages for the library system and could also read Arabic, Russian and Chinese, McMurry said.
Their sons - Mark Schweder, who lives in Aiken, S.C., and York Schweder, from Hutchinson, Kan. - could hardly believe such a thing could happen to their parents, animal lovers who adopted several dogs and cats.
The couple divorced when Mark Schweder was 2 years old, he said. Lothar Schweder left the University of Georgia in 1973 and moved to Kansas. He worked for and retired from the Kansas prison system, York Schweder said, while Sherry Allen stayed at UGA, where she started working in 1974.
Mark Schweder said his father, though a thousand miles away, stayed persistent in talking to his mother. Eventually, he won her back.
They remarried in 2000, when Mark was 32, and the couple moved onto seven acres in Oglethorpe County.
"They were just dearly loved people," Mark Schweder said of his parents. "And they loved it out here. They loved their pets as if they were their children."
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The man who fed the dogs was going to be charged for the murders from my understanding....I'm honestly think there is more to this story than what is being shown in out paper. It just doesn't add up in my head. I understand the situation completely but something just isn't clicking....None the less god bless these people and I hope their family finds some closer and those damn dogs are taken care of.
