Sheriff Willie March says Christopher Malone was playing behind a mobile home in the rural Thornton community Monday near a chain-link pen where the two dogs were locked up.
According to March, the dogs somehow managed to get out and attacked the toddler, who was pronounced dead on the scene from him wounds.
Malone's mother was hospitalized with injuries she suffered when she tried to pull the pit bulls off the child, Mississippi News Now reported.
Both pets were later carried away by animal control officers. Their fate has yet to be determined.
Thornton is about 10 miles southwest of Tchula and 16 miles west of Lexington, the county seat.
Tragedy struck just after 4pm Monday as little Christopher was playing near the dog enclosure behind his home.
‘The dog just jumped him and took him down and dragged him in the back and killed him, ate him up,’ the victim’s aunt Lucy Mayze told the station.
No one in the family witnessed the attack, but when Christopher's mother realized that the toddler was not in the house, she went outside to look for him and found the boy being ravaged by the two animals.
Relatives say the pit bulls had never attacked anyone before and were not known to be aggressive.
The news channel WAPT reported that the dogs have been raised by the family since they were puppies, and they were around children all the time, according to the family.
Christopher’s death comes just two months after the family lost a grandmother in a house fire.
(Daily Mail - April 1, 2014)
What a sad waste of life. That poor, sweet, innocent child.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what the nutters will claim he did to provoke this fatal attack, as they always make some excuse?
I guess playing in your own yard is provoking to unstable dogs, so much so that then then climbed an enormous fence just to kill the kid playing.