Terminally Ill Boy Reunited With His Dog

A shaggy black and white dog named Beethoven was reunited Wednesday with his “best friend”--a terminally ill 10-year-old boy--after the dog disappeared from the family car outside a Harbor City hospital where the boy was receiving treatment.

“When he saw Beethoven, he started making sounds and touching him,” Angela Ramos, 31, said of her son, Martin, who suffers from inoperable multiple brain tumors that have left him mentally and physically handicapped since birth. “And Beethoven was all over Martin, licking him and wagging his tail. I’m so happy. I never thought we would see him again.”

Beethoven, a 5-year-old Lhasa apso, disappeared Sunday after being left in the family car with the windows partly rolled down in a shaded handicapped parking space outside Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Harbor City. He was found Wednesday in a Wilmington public housing project at the home of a woman who told police she had taken the dog home after she found him wandering around the hospital.

A neighbor in the housing project, Dario Montoya, 45, himself the father of a handicapped child, had seen the dog and notified Ramos and the police.

Police said no criminal charges are likely to be filed in the case. The woman who had the dog was unavailable for comment.

Angela Ramos, a San Pedro resident, said after Beethoven’s disappearance that the dog was her son’s best friend and that his loss had caused Martin to sink into depression. Martin Ramos has the mental capacity of a 9-month-old and cannot speak or move extensively without assistance. Ramos said that Martin responded to Beethoven and that having the dog had kept her son alive. The Ramoses found Beethoven, wet and hungry, in San Pedro in January, and after being unable to find the dog’s owner they kept him as their own.

Widespread media reports of the dog’s disappearance, and young Martin’s plight, prompted hundreds of calls to the LAPD’s Harbor Division and to the Ramos home.

“The phone was ringing all night,” Ramos said. “People were so nice; they wanted to help me find Beethoven, they wanted to send me another dog, they wanted to give money. It is nice to know that people are so good.” Police said they received more than 200 calls about the missing dog, most of them offers of help.

Ramos, who is employed only part time, seemed embarrassed by TV news reports that she and her three young children, including Martin, were facing eviction from their San Pedro apartment because of money problems.

“I’m not going to worry about all that now,” she said. “I’m just too happy that Beethoven is back.”