It all started when Haley Green and her younger sister were playing in their back yard and they heard dogs barking.
When 10-year-old Haley looked up, she saw the focus of the dogs attention -- a boy from her school named Mario Lopez.
"Mario was riding his bike down the street when the dogs sort of lunged at him, so he jumped off and put the bike between him and the dogs," said Haley Green.
The two girls yelled for their mother. Jodie Green heard them and with one look out the window, she ran across the street and right into the middle of what she described as chaos.
"They had him backed up into a bush," said Jodie Green. "Your first thought is you are going to make the dogs go away, run away, but they were relentlessly after him."
Jodie, who is just over 5 feet tall, told Local 2 she tried fending off the dogs with Mario's bike and grabbed sticks to push them off the boy, who by this time was trapped on the ground.
Down the street at the house Mario had just dropped off a friend to go swimming, mom Denise Lanning told Local 2, a group of kids came running through her front door.
"All the kids were screaming that Mario was being attacked," said Lanning. "I could hear him screaming and just started running down the street where I first saw Jodie standing, back up, covered in Mario's blood from head to toe. She had blood all over her. As I got close, I could see Mario in the ditch screaming."
The women told Local 2 the combination of blood, sweat and dog slobber made it impossible to stand up and hold the dogs.
"We were both laying in the ditch hanging onto their collars," said Lanning. "I do remember looking at Jodie and realizing this dog is actually pulling her."
At one point, each woman was able to hold onto the collar of one of the dogs. The mothers told Local 2 they yelled back at Mario to run. The women said the boy did not move. He was missing a chunk from his arm and leg, his left ear and a piece of his chest was hanging off, and he had bite marks and scratches on almost every visible part of his body.
"By the time we got the dogs off of him, he was already at the point of not screaming anymore. He was almost giving up," said Lanning.
Green told Local 2 the mothers both kept telling the boy he had to get up and finally he did. Mario made it to Green's driveway where her daughters got him inside.
"He was in pain but he wasn't crying. He was in shock," said Haley.
As soon as Mario was safe, the women let go of the dogs. Lanning told Local 2 she has grown up with dogs and has even been bitten by one, but she never imagined a dog of any breed could be responsible for such an attack.
"It was absolutely vicious," said Lanning. "They weren't going to stop. They were completely focused on him and every time we would get them to jump back away from him, they would skirt right back around us and go back to attacking him again."
[NOTE: This is called 'gameness', traits bred into the dog in which they zero in on a target and will not stop. You can stab them with a butcher knife, beat them with a baseball bat, taser them, even shoot them and they will still be trying to attack their target. What other breed of dog does this???]
DeAnn Lopez called the moms heroes for what they did to save her son. Mario's mother told Local 2 she thinks if the women had not shown up when they did, her son would be dead.
The women said they did what any mom would do given the circumstances.
On Monday, both dogs were euthanized after their owners released them into the care of Harris County Animal Control.
The owners, Michael Hanes and Kimberly Sheppard, appeared in Harris County court last week.
Michael Turner, the attorney for the couple, told Local 2 the two who have an 18-month-old child are devastated by what has happened.
Prosecutor Belinda Smith charged Hanes and Sheppard with the dog attack, specifically failing to secure their dogs.
Smith told Local 2 they could face anywhere from two to 10 years in prison, if convicted.
(KPRC - July 13, 2011)
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