The dogs, which both appeared to be a boxer mix, had gotten loose from a neighbor's yard a few hundred feet up Chancey Road. They started mauling John Ashmore while he was picking up the newspaper in front of his house.
"I could hear John screaming, the dogs attacking," neighbor Ernie Naylor says.
That's when Naylor raced across the street. He tried to get the dogs away while Ashmore's daughter hit them with a broom. According to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office, those efforts may have helped save his life.
"That's just something everybody should do. They would have done it for me hopefully," says Naylor.
When the Pasco County Sheriff's Office arrived, the boxers charged again. Deputies fatally shot both of them.
"This gentleman went through a lot of pain. He had puncture marks all over his body," Sgt. Steven Greiner says. "The attack occurred over several minutes. The gentleman was on the ground and, according to him, he thought it felt like 30 minutes."
The dogs' owners were not home at the time, and deputies say they have been cooperative so far in the investigation. People who live nearby say the owners are fairly new to the neighborhood, and that they installed a fence when they moved in to keep the dogs contained.
According to neighbor Tammy Goodman, the boxers were typically well behaved and were acting strangely on Sunday morning.
"The dogs were loose and they were trying to get up on my brother's porch," says Tammy Goodman. "I looked over and they came charging at me. I ran my butt in the house. Next thing I knew, I heard gunshots."
Neighbors say they've been told that any remaining dogs the owners had were taken away. As for Ashmore, neighbors are hoping he will recover from this. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer.
The Pasco County Sheriff's Office says it sees a high risk of infection when these kinds of attacks occur. The charges that the owners could face depend on what investigators find as they look into this.
"I just hope the old man makes it," Goodman says. "All of our prayers go out to him."
(WTSP - Aug 14, 2011)
