Neighbors of Patrick Shunn and Monique Patenaude notified authorities of the couple’s disappearance after noticing their untended livestock. Friends and Pasado’s Safe Haven have stepped in to help the animals.
The sheep, chickens and dog left on Patrick Shunn’s and Monique Patenaude’s Arlington farm after the couple went missing are safe.
Soon after authorities launched their investigation into the couple’s disappearance and slayings last month, which started only after neighbors noticed the livestock untended, friends and the Pasado’s Safe Haven animal-rights group stepped in to care for the pair’s cherished animals.
“It was such a sad situation,” said Pasado’s Executive Director Laura Henderson. “These sheep had nowhere else to go.”
As authorities piece together the double murder, an investigation that has spanned international borders and so far resulted in one arrest, the animals are adjusting to their new homes.
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Friends took in the smaller pets, and Pasado’s now has the couple’s eight Barbados Black Belly sheep, six adults and two lambs, Henderson said. Those animals are now undergoing medical treatment at the nonprofit’s Monroe facility, a standard procedure, she said, before caregivers there put them up for adoption as early as next month.
“We assume we’ll keep them together as a group because that’s the life they’ve known,” Henderson said. “They were really well-loved, and we’re going to do our best” to find them the same kind of care.
Pasado’s will look for a permanent, safe home with enough land and the right facilities for the sheep, she added. Most of the animals at the Monroe facility — llamas, cats, geese and the like — were victims of abuse or neglect, and caregivers go through the same process of finding them new homes.
The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office said in a late-April statement from the couple’s families that Shunn’s and Patenaude’s animals were their “passion.”
Shunn, 45, went to work April 11, but he didn’t show up the next day at his job in Kirkland, investigators said. Patenaude, 46, was last seen about 1 p.m. April 11 near the couple’s home in the 27800 block of Whitman Road, near the site of the Oso landslide. Detectives believe they were killed April 11.
Michael and Suzanne Loo, friends and neighbors, reported them missing after finding the couple’s dog running loose and other animals untended at the 20-acre farm, but no sign of Shunn and Patenaude or their vehicles at their home.
Investigators found the couple’s Land Rover Discovery and Jeep apparently driven off a remote embankment near Oso on April 14. Tony Clyde Reed, 49, and his brother, John Blaine Reed, 53, who lived next to the couple, are charged in the slayings.
The younger brother made arrangements through an attorney to surrender last week to U.S. Marshals near the U.S.-Mexico border, though John Reed remains at large.
Tony Reed was arraigned in Snohomish County on Tuesday. Later in the day, the Sheriff’s Office said he had led authorities to what they believe are the couple’s bodies in woods near their home. Formal identification is pending.
Court records outline long-running hostilities between neighbors that may have led to the couple’s disappearance. John Reed was reportedly involved in an “ongoing and constant” dispute with Shunn and Patenaude and, at one point, threatened to shoot them for cutting brush between their two properties, court documents allege.