The first sign that something was wrong was the bloody dog.
The animal ran inside its home on Aloha Drive in Vidor, Texas, where Ashley Phillips was visiting a friend.
Phillips’ five-year-old son, Tanner Smith, had been jumping on a trampoline in the fenced-in yard, where the dog had come from and another dog had been.
“When one of the dogs came running in the house and was covered in blood,” Tanner’s aunt, Melinda Greathouse, 28, told INSIDE EDITION. “That’s when my sister ran outside and they found Tanner’s body next to the porch.”
The homeowner’s two pit bulls had mauled the vivacious kindergartner, who was thought to be playing outside under the supervision of the homeowner. But the man was not there during the attack and no one heard the child scream as he was severely bitten more than one dozen times, including once in an artery in his neck, Greathouse said.
Emergency responders rushed Tanner to a nearby hospital, but he could not be saved.
“His whole left side of his head had a hole in it. His ear was gone. There was a lot of what looked like road rash on his face. Did they drag him?” Greathouse tearfully wondered aloud. “He didn’t cry out. Neighbors were out there around that time and they didn’t hear anything. They just heard my sister cry out.”
Tanner was only two days away from turning six when he was attacked. He wanted a ‘Scooby-Doo’-themed birthday party to celebrate and his family was happy to oblige the boy who had been through so much.
VICIOUS DOGS HAD ATTACKED BEFORE
The same dogs were quarantined for 10 days in December of last year after they bit a 9-year-old girl and her mother as the pair walked by the home, police said.
The dogs allegedly got out of their yard by digging a hole below the fence and made puncture wounds in the victims’ skin, but the injuries did not meet the criteria under Texas law to deem the dogs dangerous, cops said.
“Isn’t that terrible? It really is. It’s awful that it comes down to that (criteria). If something had been done then, a life could have been saved,” Greathouse said.
The dogs' owner paid the injured parties' medical bills and appropriately restrained his dogs after the 2014 incident, police said. But that comes as little comfort to Tanner’s family.
“Ashley didn’t know the dogs were that way. She didn’t know… otherwise they wouldn’t have been there,” Greathouse said.
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