{"id":4640,"date":"2026-05-04T13:37:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T18:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=4640"},"modified":"2026-05-04T19:55:57","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T00:55:57","slug":"a-dogs-death-and-a-companys-responsibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=4640","title":{"rendered":"A Dog’s Death and a Company’s Responsibility"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

\"\" The story of a dog left with a \u201ctrusted\u201d sitter when his soldier owner was deployed, only to wind up abandoned and left to die by the sitter in the vehicle he\u2019d stolen has become national news. A horror story and cautionary tale read by pet owners and dog lovers around the world as we all waited for news with diminishing hopes until the worst possible outcome was revealed.

The company Trusted Housesitters which \u201cmatched\u201d the sitter and the soldier is cooperating with the police and has put out the usual corporate gibberish.

The sitter, Andrew Jansen is being sought by the police and was last seen apparently in Florida. Jansen didn\u2019t \u201cwork\u201d for Trusted Housesitters. Despite the name, THS is not a service but an exchange. Sitters exchange home and pet care for \u201cunique home stays.: As a rule, no money passes hand between the parties.

So neither Jansen, nor the soldier were employed by THS. Both paid for \u201cmemberships.\u201d Jansen as a sitter, and the soldier as a pet owner. Possibly a small \u201cbooking fee\u201d was paid by either Jansen or the soldier or both. THS only recently started charging the fees and they are dependent on joining\/renewal date and tier. It\u2019s not clear what the fee actually covers, and it doesn\u2019t seem to offer added protections for anyone.

What\u2019s not being said in Trusted Housesitter\u2019s statement is that they are in any way responsible for what happened. And maybe they aren\u2019t legally although I would imagine that CEO Matthew Prior must be well aware of the recent US civil court case where a woman raped by an Uber driver brought suit against Uber and was awarded $8.6 million in dollars in damages. The driver didn\u2019t technically work for Uber either, but the ride was booked through the app, and ultimately Uber was found responsible for the driver\u2019s actions.

In the case of Trusted Housesitters homeowners are told to \u201cvet\u201d sitters, who apply to their \u201clistings\u201d but this wording is relatively recent. There aren\u2019t a lot of guidelines offered on how. Sitters in most of the world go through an ID-verification process. In the US there is also a \u201ccriminal\u201d background check though it\u2019s unclear at least to most members what this encompasses and what it doesn\u2019t. Convictions? Arrests? Apparently the sitter had many driving charges but it\u2019s not clear if any were criminal or resulted in convictions. Maybe there is a level of convictions that still allows you to \u201cpass\u201d and get your membership? Who knows? If you look at the small print, the company isn\u2019t \u201cresponsible\u201d for anything that happens to either party or to the pets.

But wasn\u2019t this Uber\u2019s argument more or less? Drivers are independent operators paid by customers with Uber only taking a small cut acting as a middleman through its platform? Drivers don\u2019t actually work for Uber in the conventional sense in this brave new \u201csharing\u201d economy. There are ratings and reviews. If customers have issues they can bring them up or complain directly to the company. Similarly, THS has a rating system which if you pay attention to what\u2019s publicly on the forums often involves both homeowners and sitters leaning over backwards to avoid mentioning anything short of the worst offenses lest they be scolded on the forums for being \u201cpetty\u201d or receive a scathing public response from the person they reviewed. Homeowners know that writing a bad review could lead other sitters to avoid the site in the future since reviews are a big part of vetting.

I don\u2019t have access to Jansen\u2019s profile, but apparently he had 5-star reviews with no mention of any issues. If he had any problematic sits where homeowners decided not to review, the soldier would have had no way of knowing about them.

\u00a0I\u2019ve been a member of THS for years. I signed up in late 2022 as a homeowner. In 2023, I upgraded to a \u201ccombined premium\u201d membership allowing me to sit as well. It\u2019s gone well. I\u2019ve enjoyed hosting compassionate competent sitters in my home, and I\u2019ve enjoyed free accommodations in Hudson Valley VRBO-ready homes, cities in the US like San Fransisco and Portland and even one time in a village in the south of France.

For me the \u201ccombo\u201d has been a high-value asymmetrical home exchange. My Manhattan catsit\u00a0 is considered a \u201chighly desirable\u201d one by THS standards. But clearly it doesn\u2019t work out that well for everyone. Many homeowners find it difficult to find \u201cfree\u201d sitters willing to stay in suburbs or take care of pets in need of extra care. Sitters vary. Some are part timers like me. Others are fully nomadic, and while most have steady income through remote jobs, passive income, retirement accounts etc, a large subset seem to be more sporadically employed, relying on sits for housing, and out there without a lot of support or resources when things go wrong.

Through the official forum and its feistier Reddit sister, I\u2019ve become aware of numerous THS disasters: Indoor cats escaping through windows or doors never to be seen again. A dog drowned. Was it negligence by the sitter or should the homeowner have had a gate around the pool? We\u2019ll never know because both parties seem to have signed NDAs in the settlement. And there was a story of some sitter who didn\u2019t show up or maybe showed up once and decided not for me and two dogs starved to death. More recently a couple who somehow managed to join through another country so no background check and they burglarized their way through several California homes. Now this.

I get it. There are tens of thousands of sits going on throughout the world all the time. Things are going to go wrong somewhere. Maybe THS\u2019s track record is better than Rovers. I know they\u2019ve had incidents too. But I’m not a user of or sitter for Rover.\u00a0 I\u2019m feeling dirty somehow for my participation. I need to break my habit of giving helpful advice on the forum. I spent this morning looking up my history in case I said anything at any point to the soldier that could have encouraged him to make the fatal pick. I found that when he looked for help after his initial sitter cancelled just before his deployment, I flagged the thread and suggested that maybe given the circumstances THS could help him. I don\u2019t know if they did or not but he confirmed a second sitter, and now the rest is history and tabloid news, and I wish I’d told him to do something else.

I am currently reading a sci-fi novel set in a future dystopia. The protagonist is a robot-valet who has killed his master for reasons he doesn\u2019t remember or understand. He is programmed to want to be a valet and he seeks further employment hoping he can find something where killing only<\/em> one master won\u2019t be an issue. It\u2019s an absurd premise because of course there is no acceptable murder quota. Just as there is no acceptable rape quota on Uber. But Uber was still found responsible and this despite taking many different kinds of actions to prevent rapes from happening once it became publicly clear that Uber-rapes were a thing.

It\u2019s not clear that Trusted Housesitters will take any action to make sure that what happened to Maverick won\u2019t happen again ever to any pet under the care of a Trustedhousesitter. It\u2019s not clear what actions they could have taken in this issue, at least not publicly and not yet.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

It looks like the sitter\u00a0 \u201cpassed\u201d a criminal background check and had no problematic reviews had some kind of breakdown and did something terrible.\u00a0 Some people are reporting the sitter had numerous driving infractions which presumably didn’t go into the report or maybe like murdering one’s employer in the novel I’m reading, didn’t count.<\/p>\r\n

The soldier knew there was a problem when communication abruptly stopped. The soldier took action by getting in touch with his friends to find out what was happening. Police were involved early on.\u00a0 But there is a lot we don’t know that isn’t public knowledge. What about all of the previous sits. Were there concerns people had that they didn\u2019t tell anyone? Were there reviews not written that should have been? Or maybe there were concerns but the company did nothing.

So far we haven\u2019t heard publicly from Trusted Housesitters CEO, Matthew Prior who is normally hands-on enough to feature himself in videos and post in the THS blog under his name.

Surely, this is a time for some public statements and internal discussions.\u00a0 There are many changes in policy that might help in the future:<\/p>\r\n