German Shepherd mauled by pit bulls; police stand by and watch. For TWENTY MINUTES.

NORTH CAROLINA -- At first glance it’s difficult to tell that Max, a rather large and intimidating German shepherd, has been through hell.

He’s a trained guard dog, wary of strangers and protective of those who take care of him. If you peek in on Max at the service station where he stays during the day, you wouldn’t notice that he’s hurting.

Until he stands up, that is.

Then you can tell. The big dog hobbles along, favoring a back leg. He doesn’t hear so well and has trouble seeing. Eating can cause him trouble, too.

His ailments weren’t caused by old age, either. Max was mauled by a pair of pit bulls that his owner believes were deliberately turned loose on him. And that’s been a source of frustration — no one in authority will listen to Max’s story.

"My dog was terrorized. He damn near lost his leg and there was blood everywhere,” said David Grubbs, Max’s owner. “The police stood there for 30 minutes and wouldn’t do anything. Neither would the dogcatcher.”

‘No fight left in him’

Grubbs owns the Parkway Texaco service station and runs a towing business out of it. He also has a lot on Vargrave Street where he stores vehicles.

Max has lived for 12 years on that property, a storage lot inside a tall chain link fence topped with barbed wire. He’s not a pet. He’s a working dog, trained to guard the property and keep intruders out.

The evening of June 20 there were intruders, a pair of pit bulls that got into the lot and literally tore Max to pieces.

"He had more than 200 puncture wounds in him,” Grubbs said. “The vet bill was $3,600.”

Grubbs found out about the attack from one of his drivers, Terry Alley, who was working that evening. A woman who lives near the Vargrave Street storage lot came to the station shortly after 8 p.m. to tell somebody that Max was being attacked by pit bulls and that two boys had put them inside the lot.

"When I got there, (the pit bulls) had him under a trailer pulling on both sides of his head,” Alley said. “There wasn’t any fight left in him. I called the law. There were two boys trying to get inside the fence to get the dogs. A third one was filming it on a phone.”

As to what happened next, we’ll rely on witness accounts provided by Alley and Grubbs, who had driven over to find out what had happened to his dog, and reports filed with the Winston-Salem Police Department. Messages left with the Forsyth County Sheriff’s animal-control squad weren’t returned.

City police patrol officers responded and … waited. “They just stood there and watched,” Alley said. “They said their sergeant told them not to enter that fence because the dogs were contained and humans weren’t involved.”

So the mauling continued for at least another 15-20 minutes until animal control and the owner of the pit bulls, who lives nearby, arrived.

Understandable frustration

Not long after animal-control officers arrived, the [attack] was [finally stopped]. The owner of the pit bulls called them off and agreed to surrender them to animal control. Michael Farrar was later given a citation for violating leash laws.

Grubbs went to tend to Max and take him to a veterinarian. He said he asked police — he doesn’t recall if it was a patrol officer or animal-control deputy — if anyone was going to ask the boys if they let the pit bulls under the fence or charge them with dog fighting or cruelty to animals.

"(Investigators) said, ‘We don’t know how they got in there. They could have gotten in there by themselves,’” Grubbs said. “I said, ‘Are you stupid? Those dogs had to get out of their fence and then through another 7-foot chain link fence without help.’”

Perhaps not the most tactful way to ask for help, but his frustration is understandable. You’d be ticked, too, if your dog had been mauled and you didn’t know if he was going to live or die.

So, too, was the immediate police response. They can’t just shoot aggressive dogs if humans aren’t in danger, and they couldn’t risk being mauled, either.

(Less than a week later, we saw why. That’s when a woman was accidentally shot in the butt when new police Chief Barry Rountree fired a round at an aggressive dog that ran at him and another officer who had responded to a 911 call about an armed man.)

In the end, the pit bulls’ owner consented to have the dogs put down and, Grubbs said, apologized.

Still, he wants to know why more wasn’t done to find out how it happened. The pit bulls didn’t climb out of their kennels nor would they have had a way to pry up a secure fence. And it’s not unheard of for people to train their dogs to fight and kill other dogs just for kicks.

"Max never did anything to anybody but his job,” he said. “This was just cruel and vicious.”

(Winston-Salem Journal - Sept 28, 2013)