After the visit, Sofia and her parents Julie and Jason Knapp don’t feel like justice has been served at all, because a dog that bit and severely injured Sofia on April 8 has been allowed to live without any repercussions.
“I think the dog should be put down or at least moved to the wild or something,” Sofia said. “I don’t think it should live with people.”
City Attorney Charlie Harball said the case is an unfortunate one that has been handled within the confines of the law, but that it is unlikely the dog would have been put down given the circumstances of the case.
According to the Knapps, the neighbor had four dogs that lived in the yard, including one that appeared to be a lab mix named Buster. Buster’s owner Ben Direito hung up on the Daily Inter Lake when given the opportunity to comment on Friday. He did not return voice mails or emails Thursday or Friday.
According to the Knapps, Buster had been a minor nuisance in the past to the Knapp family. The dog sometimes would jump the four-feet-tall fence separating the homes and end up in the Knapp’s back yard. The Knapps said they did not want to be bad neighbors, so they helped get Buster back over the fence without too much fuss. While his conduct was bothersome, he never appeared aggressive before the day of the attack.
Sofia was playing in the back yard, tossing a ball on April 8, when it flew too high and went over a neighbor’s fence. Buster grabbed it.
Sofia asked the dog owner’s 4-year-old daughter, who was in the adjacent back yard with Buster, to throw the ball back over the fence. The 4-year-old said she would not throw the ball back over and Sofia said the girl invited her to climb over the fence and get the ball.
Sofia said when she asked the dog to drop the ball that he bit her twice on the upper cheek. Her eye glasses were broken in two places and blood spurted everywhere.
At the hospital, Sofia received 45 stitches.
“He bit all the way through my cheek,” Sofia said. Stitches were placed inside and outside Sofia’s cheek. A month after the incident, half of her face still droops, and she will have to continue seeking follow-up treatment.
“I can’t smile,” Sofia said. At first, her eyelids did not close all the way, though that side effect has mostly ebbed.
Sofia and her family hoped that there might be some repercussions for the damage, but so far, nothing has happened. The Kalispell City Attorney’s Office was in the process of trying to have a hearing to see if the dog needed to be declared a vicious dog, but when the owner took it and moved to Columbia Falls, the Knapps were told that the city attorney technically had no more jurisdiction over the animal.
“It’s almost like our daughter’s had this horrific injury and there’s not even a slap on the wrist,” Jason said. “They’d put a wild bear down if it did something like this.”
Julie also pointed out that if a person had cut Sofia on the cheek, caused similar injuries, and moved to Columbia Falls, it would still be possible to charge that person with a crime.
City Attorney Charlie Harball said that the city’s animal ordinances underwent a revamp two or three years ago and he believes that they are much better than they used to be.
In the case of a dog bite the animal is taken into custody if it is at large. It is quarantined in its own space if it is properly secured.
A hearing is then held and a judge gets to decide if extra safety precautions need to be taken to keep the public safe. Judges can order higher fencing or increased insurance coverage. In extreme cases, a judge can order that the animal be euthanized.
“In this case it never even got that far,” Harball said.
The owner moved out of town last week.
“Now the city of Kalispell no longer has jurisdiction over that animal,” Harball said. “We can’t order that animal be brought back into Kalispell. If the owner brings the dog back into Kalispell voluntarily, we would then have jurisdiction.”
Harball said that dog bite cases are rare and that people moving away with animals under investigation is even more rare.
“Historically we haven’t had a big issue with that — people moving dangerous animals around,” Harball said.
In this case Harball thinks it would be unlikely that the dog would have to be put down, given that it was the first documented bite case with the animal and that it occurred in the animal’s own yard.
“If an animal is within their own space it is understood that animal behavior is that if someone they don’t know comes into their space they are usually very protective,” Harball said. “I think a judge would have been pretty hesitant to put the animal down.”
He does not want to minimize Sofia’s pain or her parent’s anger.
“It doesn’t minimize the fact that it was a nasty injury,” Harball said. “It really was and I understand why the parent was so upset.”
Harball said he does not think the town has a problem with vicious dogs.
“A situation like this is really rare,” Harball said. “It is rare for a child to wander into another enclosure. Children generally know better than that. I don’t think the parents were negligent. It only takes a quick moment for something like that to happen.”
[story edited for length]
(Daily Interlake - May 17, 2016)
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