OAKLAND — Robert Holguin suddenly stopped talking Sunday afternoon and urged his friend to be quiet. Sitting in the driveway of an East Oakland home, Holguin took advantage of the silence and uttered four words: “The dogs are out.”
Minutes later, Holguin lay lifeless under a nearby car, having been attacked by three 100-pound dogs that had escaped from behind a recently repaired fence. This week, two of his close friends were stunned by the killing. One is accused of owning the dogs, and the other is dealing with the pain of trying in vain to fend off Holguin’s dogs with something that looks like a broomstick.
“Hearing him scream was the hardest part,” Gary Silva, 69, the only witness to the incident, said Friday. “All I wanted to do was get them away from him, and I kept screaming, ‘Help! Help!’”
Authorities later charged the dogs’ owner, Brendan Burke, with a single count of failing to control animals and killing a human. He was released on bail and ordered to appear in court again on September 12 to enter a plea.
Burke and Holguin were old friends who had known each other since childhood, Silva said. Holguin and Silva, another longtime friend, were both living at Burke’s house when the stabbing happened shortly before 12:30 a.m. Sunday in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood.
It all started when Silva and Holguin were spending a quiet, relaxing afternoon in Burke’s driveway in the 1600 block of 36th Avenue. Holguin was working on his car when he realized the dogs were loose and issued his terrifying warning.
Almost immediately, the dogs rushed at Silva, who jumped onto a ramp in front of the house, while Holguin took shelter in his Honda SUV, Silva said.
That’s when Holguin did something that seemed to defy reason, Silva said: He stepped out from the safety of the vehicle. The dogs turned their attention to him, chasing Holguin as he ran down the driveway and sought shelter under 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 onto a car parked next to the Lexus and then climbing on top of the vehicle itself. Kneeling on the hood, Silva reached down to try to grab Holguin’s hand as the dogs bit him. When that didn’t work, he grabbed a wooden stick and beat the dogs, until an Oakland animal services officer arrived and herded the dogs into the backyard.
By then, Holguin had fallen silent, Silva said. When he finally got out of the Lexus and looked at his friend, Silva said he had gotten sick.
“I never want to see that again,” Silva said, standing a few steps from where his friend died and remembering that he never left his side. “It was terrible.”
A relative of Holguin, often nicknamed “Rocky,” describes him as a “great man” who planned to move closer to his brother in Tennessee.
“It’s hard for the whole family, it’s heartbreaking to hear,” said Olga Holguin, 64, a relative of the victim. “It’s just devastating. The whole family is grieving and distraught.”
On Friday, blood still stained the floor of the Lexus where Holguin was trying to hide, as well as the wall of a nearby house. The fence through which the dogs escaped appeared to have been repaired; it was connected by wire and reinforced by 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 dogs, part Cane Corso, part Napoleonic Mastiff, each weighed 100 pounds, according to court documents.
Three other dogs living in the home, two males and one female of the same or similar breed, were seized by animal control officers and held for at least 10 days, per agency policy, Wood said Thursday. Messages to his agency, as well as to Oakland city spokesman Sean Maher, seeking an update on the animals’ status, were not answered Friday afternoon.
Records show that the dogs in the home had a history of “discipline problems.”
Another dog owned by Burke, named Sicily II, lunged at a smaller dog and grabbed it in its mouth in October 2023, Wood said Thursday. That incident happened while Sicily II was on a leash and Burke was holding the dog while he was riding his bike, she said. Oakland Animal Services chose not to pursue charges against Burke after the incident because the owner of the smaller dog declined to pursue the case with the agency, records show.
Reached by phone Friday, Burke declined to comment, saying he wanted to speak to his decades-old friend’s family before speaking to the media.
Silva, meanwhile, tried to make sense of Friday’s killing. He defended Burke as a “nice guy” and a “good guy” who loved his dogs and was willing to offer his Fruitvale home to friends in need.
Silva himself began living in the house while he was going through a divorce. It was then, he says, in one of the darkest moments of his life, that Burke’s dogs became a source of calm and peace. He remembers one of them, a massive dog named Murdock who was not one of the attackers, coming up to him and curling up on his bed.
“At first I was scared because he’s so big,” Silva said. “But he became my friend. He may look fierce, but he’s not at all. He’s a good dog.”
The dogs would escape from the yard “every now and then,” Silva said. But he couldn’t recall a single instance of the dogs hurting anyone before Sunday. He said Burke tried to contain them, including when the dogs got out the day before the attack.
“He tried to secure that fence, it’s not like he neglected it,” Silva said.
