"It's a good community. I just want my kids to be able to ride their bikes."
But the Pasadena mother of two knows firsthand just how the nine-year old boy suffered as a pit bull locked its jaws around his leg and wouldn’t let go.
"That was the most vicious attack I've ever seen. I've never seen a dog attack a child before. I never want to see that again."
While Anne Arundel County Police Spokesman Justin Mulcahy paints a picture of an unsuspecting victim, "It appears the child was on his bicycle with his mother near by."
The dog’s owner, Donna Helms, says there’s more to the story.
"It wasn't no mother and her innocent little kid running down the street. That's not what happened. They were coming here specifically. There's the daddy right there."
That’s right.
The so-called daddy, an aging pit bull named Remy, was roaming around the front yard without a leash in about the same area where Helms’s other dog attacked the boy.
"He latched on to his leg and I tried getting him off and it didn't work,” said Helms’s son, Jason, “So a neighbor had a baseball bat and that's usually how I break the fights up between these dogs."
While many pit bull advocates say it’s the owner, not the breed who is to blame for such attacks, Donna Helms blames the victim and his mother for this one.
"They've been told not to come. They've been told not to bring their children to this house, and they refused to listen. The kid was scared of the dog. You can't be scared of those kinds of dogs. You have to pet them and let them know that you love them, because they're very people-oriented animals."
Helms says a few months ago, the same dog that attacked the boy attacked one of her other pit bulls ripping a chunk out of its chest.
She adds the vet’s bill set her back $1,000.
(ABC2News - May 24, 2012)
