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The head of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group behind Project 2025, allegedly told colleagues decades ago that he killed a neighbor’s dog with a shovel, according to a report.
Former colleagues recalled to The Guardian that Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, told them that he had killed his neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 because the dog’s barking was bothering his family. Roberts, now the architect of the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump presidency, was an assistant professor of history at New Mexico State University from 2003 to 2005.
Kenneth Hammond, the history department chair at the time, told the outlet: “My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem.”
Five others — four professors and one professor’s spouse — also shared similar accounts with The Guardian. The sources never mentioned whether the pit bull had ever posed a threat to his family.
Roberts vehemently denied the claims and shared a very different version of events.
“This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence,” he told the outlet. “In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”
He also claimed that the city — Las Cruces — later removed “more than ten dogs” from his neighbor’s property due to animal abuse. Las Cruces Animal Control told The Independent that its records do not go as far back as 2004. The Independent has reached out to the city’s police department for more information.
When contacted by The Independent, Mary Vought, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, said the allegations were categorically false and the organization’s legal team would be reaching out toThe Guardian.
“This so-called news article is a slanderous hit job; this never happened,” the statement said. “The ‘reporting’ is based on 20-year-old hearsay where the dog owner himself admits he doesn’t even know what happened to this dog. Our defamation counsel is examining this now, and we reserve the right to take all legal action against The Guardian, as the story is false. We have witnesses who can attest to its inaccuracy, and we trust you will avoid any defamation liability.”
Marsha Weisiger, a former colleague of Roberts, recalled hearing the disturbing story — that he had allegedly killed the dog with a shovel — while she and her husband were at dinner at Roberts’s home.
The dinner happened 20 years ago, “but you don’t really forget a story like that,” Professor Weisiger told The Independent. “I wouldn’t even begin to make something like that up,” she said, adding that they haven’t spoken since he left his post and she has “no bone to pick with him.”
“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” Weisiger told The Guardian.
Roberts’ former neighbor, Daniel Aran, who took care of small pit bulls, told the outlet that one of his dogs, Loca, had disappeared in 2004. “She went missing, and we never could find her,” he said.
Aran, who was recently released from prison after being sentenced in 2017 to 78 months behind bars for cocaine trafficking, did not accuse Roberts of killing the dog. But, when told of the allegations by Roberts’ colleagues, he replied: “Man, you never know what’s inside someone’s head.”
“I’m not here to make up stories or to say he did it...But it was right around 2004 when all that happened, that Loca was missing,” he told the outlet. “I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that. But I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her. She wasn’t at the dog catcher’s.”
Both he and his mother, who also lives at the home, denied Roberts’ claim that their dogs had ever been taken away due to animal abuse. Norma Noriega, Aran’s mother, told The Guardian: “It was only with Loca that we could never figure out what happened. She disappeared, and we always knew it was strange that we simply never saw her again. [Daniel] went out looking for her, but she was never found.”
Since 2021, Roberts has helmed the Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025 — a right-wing roadmap for a potential second Trump administration that would grant the president unprecedented control over federal agencies and empower Trump loyalists. In July, Roberts alarmingly claimed that the country was in the middle of a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
As the former president has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, he and his running mate JD Vance in recent weeks have been perpetuating other disturbing dog killing claims. The pair have been pushing baseless allegations that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eat dogs and cats. The city’s police and officials have said these claims were unsubstantiated.
The state’s governor Mike DeWine, who supports the GOP nominees, said in a Friday op-ed that he was “saddened” by how they keep repeating the evidence-less claims and stood up for the migrants of Springfield: “Our people and our history deserve better than to be falsely portrayed.”
The shocking report also comes months after South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem made headlines for bragging in her memoir about shooting her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer Cricket, calling the creature “untrainable” and “less than worthless… as a hunting dog.”
She conceded in her book that while “it was not a pleasant job... it had to be done”.
