A neighborhood north of Bastrop is on edge after residents began reporting a spate of pet poisonings on social media.

Suzanne Hollon woke up Sunday morning to a phone call she never expected. Her two dogs, her neighbor told her, were lying motionless in their driveway showing no signs of life.

The three-year-old German Shepherd mix and four-year-old Rottweiler mix — two dogs who were healthy the night before — had dug a hole under Hollon’s fence and gotten out. During their overnight escapade, the dogs apparently got into some kind of poison, Hollon said.

“They were lying in the driveway of my next-door neighbor’s house like they had gone to sleep, but they were dead,” Hollon said Tuesday. “They were cold, but they weren’t stiff yet.”

Heartbroken, Hollon grabbed a wheelbarrow and buried the two dogs in her yard. Her one surviving pup, Jango, who had escaped the yard with the other two but eluded death thanks to his picky eating habits, curled around the graves in grief as she dug.

Hollon later recounted what happened in a Facebook group associated with where she lives — the Camp Swift and Lake Bastrop Acres neighborhood in Central Bastrop County. Soon afterward, other residents began posting similar stories.

One person said they found their dog dead after coming home last Saturday night before their second dog died Sunday morning. Another neighbor said her puppy had gotten poisoned while in her yard. According to Sandy Millner, who began unofficially tallying the number of reported pet deaths in the area, more than a dozen dogs and one cat have been reported dead in recent days.

“A lot of poison was out there, 13 dogs died in one night,” Hollon said. “Someone is either malicious or very careless, but it needs to stop.”

Bastrop County Animal Services director Ashley Hermans said Wednesday that Hollon was the only resident who had reported the incident to animal control officers. Bastrop County Sheriff Maurice Cook, whose office would lead a criminal investigation if these deaths were determined to be acts of animal cruelty, said his office had not received any criminal complaints related to the poisonings as of Wednesday.

It’s not uncommon for dogs to get sick or die after wandering into another person’s yard and getting into rodent control baits, or for healthy pets to suddenly die from venomous snake bites, Hermans said.

“I don’t know if there’s something like that going on again, it certainly could happen,” Hermans said. Rodent poison is "a bait designed to target specifically rodents, but dogs of course will get into anything.”

“Really it’s all speculation at this point,” she said, adding that the county's Animal Services office will continue to monitor the situation.