The woman who had former Patriots linebacker Jerod Mayo’s dog under her care when the pet died is coming clean. To an extent, at least.

Dog trainer Amelia Ferreira, charged last week with obstruction in lying to police during the search for Mayo’s 5-year-old English bulldog, Knox, apologized to Mayo and his family for keeping them in the dark about Knox’s death but said she was unsure how he died. Ferreira originally told Wrenthan, R.I., police on June 28 that she had lost Knox while on a walk with him and another dog.

That led Mayo to coordinate a search for Knox that included “scuba teams, private investigators, lawyers and more,” the two-time Pro Bowler wrote on Instagram following Ferreira’s arrest, and lasted over a month, until Knox was found dead in a trash bag in Ferreira’s closet on Aug. 5. The body was placed there, the trainer says, in an effort to frame her husband for the death.

“I don’t know why Knox died and it eats at me every day that his family is still left not knowing what caused his death,” Ferreira, 41, said in a six-page statement to The Sun Chronicle. “I didn’t make the right decisions but what I am 100 percent sure of is that I absolutely did not hurt Knox nor did I do anything to him that caused his death.”

In her follow-up account to police, Ferreira said she put Knox in a crate in an air-conditioned room on June 22 when she left her home to train another dog. When she returned four hours later and opened Knox’s crate to feed him, according to the police report, she found him dead.

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It’s been a great 5 years with my guy Knox. He’s helped us so much and grew with our family. Not one minute was taken for granted. @offleashk9trainingprov decided his time was up. And we have to live with that and help our kids understand that. R.I.P Jaeger “Knox” Mayo

A post shared by Jerod Mayo (@jerod_mayo51) on Aug 10, 2018 at 4:42am PDT

“I sat there on the floor holding Knox in my lap, crying for what seemed like hours. I was scared to death and had no clue what to do,” wrote Ferreira, who called herself a “coward” for being too scared at the time to tell the Mayos the truth.

“I wasn’t only acting like a coward, I was being selfish. Lying was easier. Telling the truth would have been hard,” she added.

Police were alerted to signs of animal abuse in Ferreira’s home when they arrested her husband, 41-year-old Darrel Ferreira, on July 9 on charges of domestic assault and discovered five dogs in bad health that he was watching in his basement, according to the report. The Ferreiras are legally married but live separately in the home, police said.

The closet where Knox was found last week was checked the day of Darrel Ferreira’s arrest, but at the time Amelia Ferreira had hidden Knox in a bag and a box behind a shed in the yard, she told police. She said she then placed the dog’s remains in the closet with the hope her husband would be blamed for Knox’s death.

Tests on Knox for cause of death were inconclusive, though no signs of trauma were revealed. Mayo, a Super Bowl champion with the Patriots in 2015, simultaneously grieved Knox’s death and expressed his anger with Ferreira in a post last week.

“IT’s disgusting and inhumane that a company full of ‘dog lovers’ would hide a family pet IN A CLOSET FOR TWO MONTHS and compulsively lie and send us on a wild goose hunt and our kids on an emotional rollercoaster,” the 32-year-old wrote on Instagram.

Ferreira reportedly said she was now telling the truth because she didn’t want her own pet dogs to be taken from her.