About 50 people turned out for the committee’s first meeting of the year Monday and only two items were on the agenda. The committee elected Brandon Butts as its new chairman and then heard from four residents of Delmar Drive and a man from a nearby neighborhood about the fear they said they face when Charlotte Frazier’s pit bulls run loose.
But it wasn’t their stories that counted. Immediately after the meeting, the Animal Control Committee officially heard Frazier’s appeal.
‘They ripped and they tore’
County Attorney Tim Harvey presided over the hearing, which felt much like a trial, with Interim Montgomery County Animal Control Director Rachel Torres and Frazier both calling witnesses and the committee deliberating like a jury.
Witnesses were sworn in and then questioned and cross-examined about what happened on Nov. 1, when a 12-year-old beagle named Skip was attacked outside his home while tied on a lead.
Owner Linda McIntosh testified her dog was attacked by loose dogs and almost died, but she acknowledged she was not home at the time and that her roommate had stepped inside the house for a few minutes just before the attack happened.
“They ripped and they tore, and they almost killed him,” McIntosh said of Frazier’s two pit bulls, Mufasa and Venus.
But Frazier said she was not convinced her dogs were to blame, because the letter in which Torres labeled them as dangerous described three pit bulls, and she said only two of hers were loose that day.
“I’m not even sure if it is my dogs,” she said. “This is the only incident I know of of my dogs being aggressive.”
The committee was told not to consider the stories told by people before the hearing about cases where Frazier’s dogs allegedly attacked other pets or acted aggressively to other people.
Torres provided the committee with several exhibits, including a compilation of other incident reports taken by police involving dogs from the same address. Asked how many there were, Torres thumbed across a thick packet of reports and said “two years’ worth.”
Animal Control Officer Willie Johnston was called by Frazier and said that while he had been called to the home numerous times, in those cases her dogs were not acting aggressively. He said he had only seen the two dogs in question from a window.
Witness helped save beagle
Ross Morford had no doubt that Frazier’s dogs were responsible for the attack.
He said he was visiting a friend at the home of one of McIntosh’s neighbors when a friend alerted him to something happening outside.
He said he saw a man on McIntosh’s deck kicking a gray pit bull and trying to get it off the beagle.
He said another dog began walking toward him and he went back inside for a gun. That dog off toward Frazier’s home near the dead end of the street and the man he’d seen moments before managed to pull the pit bull off the beagle and drag it down the steps.
He noted blood all over its muzzle and then rushed to the Beagle’s aid and tied a tourniquet around his body because it appeared intestines were coming out of his stomach.
The man who was with the gray pit bull did was not called to testify.
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| Twelve-year-old Skip is lucky to be alive after the pit bulls attacked |
Frazier said her brother and his friend were watching her house and that her brother’s friend opened the door and accidentally let two of her four dogs out that day.
Her testimony may have tipped the scales against her appeal. She said her brother’s friend showed up quickly after the dogs escaped. When asked where he found the dogs, she said they were at McIntosh’s home but said he told her there was another dog there too.
Morford was recalled and said that the man he saw beating the gray pit bull was pulling it and calling it by name.
“He kept saying ‘Come on Venus, come on Venus,’” Morford said.
Unless there was another gray pit bull in the neighborhood named Venus, he said he was positive that the dog belonged to Frazier.
‘I love my dogs’
Finally, Frazier appealed to the Animal Control Committee to let her do something to keep her dogs off the Dangerous Dogs List because the requirements would be costly and unfair to her dogs.
“I love my dogs,” she said. “They’re like my children.”
She said she would work with her neighbors and Animal Control to keep them from roaming again.
But ultimately, that wasn’t something for the Committee to consider. Their task was simply to decide whether to grant Frazier’s appeal and overturn the Animal Control’s findings that Venus and Mufasa were dangerous dogs.
Ultimately they upheld the dangerous dog finding and found there were sufficient facts to deny Frazier’s appeal.
Dangerous dog law
Under the county's Dangerous Dog law, Frazier will be required to keep the dogs contained in a very secure enclosure, place a sign in the yard proclaiming the presence of a "dangerous dog" and to muzzle the dogs when they are taken to a veterinarian, the only time the dog is allowed off the owner's property.
Dangerous dogs must be spayed or neutered, have rabies shots and be implanted with a microchip that is registered with Animal Control.
If the owners don't comply with all those rules within 30 days, the dog can be euthanized.
The dogs will remain on the list for 18 months and, if there are no infractions during that time, they will be taken off the list.
(Clarksville Leaf Chronicle - January 26, 2015)
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