OAKLAND — Robert Holguin suddenly stopped talking Sunday afternoon and urged his friend to quiet down. Sitting in the driveway of an East Oakland house, Holguin took in the silence and uttered four words: “The dogs are out.”
Within minutes, Holguin lay dead beneath a nearby car after being mauled by three 100-pound dogs that had escaped from behind a recently patched fence. The killing left two of his close friends in stunned grief this week — one of them facing a felony charge as the dogs’ owner, and the other grappling with the pain of having tried in vain to fight the dogs off of Holguin with something akin to a broomstick.
“Listening to him screaming was the hardest part,” 69-year-old Gary Silva, the lone witness, recalled in an interview Friday. “All I wanted to do was keep them off him, and I kept screaming ‘Help! Help!’ ”
Authorities later charged the dogs’ owner, Brendan Burke, with a single felony count of failing to control animals killing a human. He was released on his own recognizance and ordered to appear back in court on Sept. 12 to enter a plea.
Burke and Holguin were old friends who had known each other since childhood, Silva said. And both Holguin and Silva, another longtime friend, had been living at Burke’s house when the mauling happened shortly before 12:30 p.m. Sunday in Oakland’s Fruitvale District.
It all began while Silva and Holguin were having a lazy, relaxing afternoon in Burke’s driveway on the 1600 block of 36th Avenue. Holguin had been working on his car when Holguin realized that the dogs were loose and issued his chilling warning.
Almost immediately, the dogs bolted for Silva, who jumped onto a banister in front of the house, while Holguin took shelter in his Honda SUV, Silva said.
That’s when Holguin did something that appeared to defy reason, Silva said: He got out of the safety of the vehicle. The dogs turned their attention to him, chasing Holguin as he ran down the driveway and sought shelter underneath a Lexus SUV parked next to the back fence.
“He started screaming ‘They got me! They got me! Help me!’ ” Silva recalled.
Silva said he tried to help Holguin by crawling on top of a car parked next to the Lexus, then clambering on top of the vehicle itself. Kneeling on its hood, Silva reached down to try to grab Holguin’s hand while the dogs tore at him. When that didn’t work, he grabbed a wooden stick and beat at the dogs, until an Oakland Animal Services officer arrived and penned the dogs in the back yard.
By that point, Holguin had gone quiet, Silva said. When he finally climbed off the Lexus and looked at his friend, Silva said, he became ill.
“I never want to see it again,” Silva said, while standing feet from where his friend died and recalling how he never left his side. “It was terrible.”
A relative of Holguin, who often went by “Rocky,” described him as a “great man” who was making plans to move closer to his brother in Tennessee.
“It’s hard for the whole family — it’s startling to hear,” said the relative, Olga Holguin, 64. “It’s just devastating. The whole family is grieving and just at a loss.”
On Friday, blood remained smeared on the floorboard of the Lexus where Holguin tried to hide, as well as on a wall of a nearby house. The fence the dogs escaped through appeared to have been patched back up; it was tied together with wire and buttressed with a white car door.
The three dogs involved, two females and one male, were euthanized after the attack, according to Oakland Animal Services director Emily Wood. The half-Cane Corso, half-Napoleon Mastiff dogs each weighed 100 pounds, according to court records.
Three other dogs living at the house, two males and one female of the same or similar breeds, were seized by animal control officers to be held for at least 10 days, per the agency’s policy, Wood said Thursday. Messages to her agency, as well as to Oakland city spokesman Sean Maher, seeking an update on the animals’ status were not returned Friday afternoon.
Records show that the dogs at the home had a history of “discipline issues.”
Another dog owned by Burke, named Sicily II, lunged at a smaller dog and picked it up in its mouth in October 2023, Wood said on Thursday. That incident happened while Sicily II was leashed and Burke held onto the dog while riding a bicycle, she said. Oakland Animal Services opted not to pursue any enforcement actions against Burke after the incident, because the smaller dog’s owner declined to pursue the case with the agency, records show.
Reached by phone Friday, Burke declined to comment, saying that he wanted to speak to the family of his decades-old friend before talking to the media.
Silva, meanwhile, tried to make sense of the killing Friday. He defended Burke as a “alright dude” and “good guy” who loved his dogs and was quick to offer his Fruitvale house to friends in need.
Silva himself began living at the house while going through a divorce. It was then, he said, at one of the darkest moments of his life that Burke’s dogs became a source of calm and peace. He recalled one of them, a massive dog named Murdock who was not among the attackers, coming up to him and cuddling on his bed.
“At first, I was scared, because he’s so big,” Silva said. “But he became my friend. … He might look ferocious, but he’s not at all. He’s a good dog.”
Those dogs would escape from the backyard “once in a great while,” Silva said. But he couldn’t recall an instance of the dogs hurting anyone until Sunday. He said Burke tried to keep them contained, including when the dogs got out on the day before the attack.
“He did try to secure that fence — it wasn’t like he neglected it,” Silva said.