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| A pit bull attacked and killed an infant in this house on Garfield Avenue in Kalamazoo on Feb. 19. |
KALAMAZOO, MI — Buster was a hyper, 1-year-old family pet with no history of aggressiveness toward people.
But according to a mother’s account, it took the pit bull 10 minutes or less to enter 15-day-old Darius Tillman’s bedroom, drag him out of his bassinet and maul him to death in February.
A Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety report obtained by the Kalamazoo Gazette under the state Freedom of Information Act shows that detectives sought charges of involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to animals against Darius’ 25-year-old mother, Mallory Wildig, but the Kalamazoo County Prosecutor’s Office declined to authorize charges.
The 36-page KDPS report says Wildig sobbed throughout her initial interview with Detective Sheila Goodell on Feb. 19, the day Darius was killed.
Wildig told Goodell she had been staying at her parents’ home on Nichols Road in the days following Darius’ Feb. 4 birth, returning to her home in the 400 block of Garfield Avenue to let Buster outside and give him food and water. On occasions when she was unable to make it home, she had a friend or her father stop by to feed the dog and give him water.
Wildig said that on Feb. 19 she, Darius and her 2-year-old son, Keylin Tillman, arrived at their house on Garfield between 11:30 a.m. and noon and that Keylin fed Buster two to three cups of food. The dog was then let outside and given a bath, she said.
That afternoon, she took her two children to Keylin’s room, where she read books to them then turned on a movie for Keylin while she laid Darius down for a nap in her bedroom, according to the report. Wildig told police she closed the door to her room then returned to Keylin’s room to lay the toddler down for a nap.
She told Goodell the door to her bedroom did not latch, a fact confirmed by crime-lab personnel who examined it after the incident, the report said.
Wildig said that when she laid down with Keylin, the pit bull was on the floor near them in the toddler’s room. She said she fell asleep for about 10 minutes, before the ring of her cell phone woke her. At that point, Wildig said, she went to the bathroom then went to feed Buster.
She said she noticed the dog was in the basement, which she found strange since Buster usually stayed upstairs when she was home and was confined to the basement when no one was home.
Wildig said she decided to check on Darius in her bedroom and “discovered that Darius was dead and had been mauled and partially consumed by Buster,” according to the KDPS report.
Wildig told Goodell that when she found her son, his bassinet was tilted to its side and Darius was on his back on the floor. She called her father for help then placed Darius back in his bassinet, where he was found by officers.
“When I walked into the room, there was blood on the bassinet and he just looked like a little doll on the floor,” Wildig said, according to the police report. “It felt like all of this was a nightmare.”
Sgt. Mark Johncock, one of the first officers to arrive on the scene, noted in his report that the infant showed “no signs of life.”
Wildig told detectives during their investigation that Buster’s feeding schedule changed after she gave birth Darius, during which time she stayed primarily with her parents. She said the dog had usually been fed two to three times a day but that recently it was being fed at least once daily and more food and water were being left for him in the basement.
Buster was euthanized after the attack on the infant and a veterinarian who examined him told police the dog “appeared to be getting the amount of calories it needed,” the police report said. An autopsy performed on the dog the night of Feb. 19 showed its stomach “was full of food,” the report said.
Kalamazoo County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Carrie Klein told the Gazette the entire incident “was tragic without question.”
“This was her baby,” Klein said of Wildig. “She loved her baby. She was traumatized by what happened.”
Klein said to charge Wildig with the manslaughter, as requested by police, the investigation would have had to show Wildig acted with gross negligence.
“Nobody ever saw any aggressive or violent tendencies from the pet at all,” Klein said. “There was no way for the mother to know it was going to attack and kill someone. It was not gross negligence on her part to have the dog running loose in the house with the baby in the bassinet.
“She had no way of knowing the dog was going to do what it did.”
Klein also said there was not evidence of neglect toward the dog that would support a charge of cruelty to animals.
“I couldn’t say he wasn’t getting at least adequate care,” Klein said. “Maybe it wasn’t at the same level prior to the birth (of Darius) but ... (the dog) was hydrated, it was fed.”
(MLive - June 3, 2011)
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