The pit bull bit the four year old girl on Wednesday and the attack could have been a lot worse.
The first concern is finding out if the dog is up to date on its rabies shots.
The second and more alarming part is Kristi Heinick says a person watched the attack. When she went to the home, the person living there claimed to not be the dog's owner.
Heinick and her daughter Khloe take that walk twice a day. They go around the block with their dog, a Shiba Inu named Doggie, and then home.
On Wednesday afternoon, that walk was interrupted when a pit bull got in the way.
"She saw the dog in the yard and she told me it went through the fence," said Heinick.
"I said, 'Stay still,'" Heinick recalled Thursday. "He just came running. He latched on and was throwing Doggie around, and he was out for blood."
Heinick was able to grab the collar of the pit bull, and then it turned the focus to Khloe, biting into her left thigh, tearing into the flesh and muscle on the inner and outer parts of her leg.
"Words can't even describe what I was thinking,” added Heinick. “I couldn't move, I couldn't breathe, I was just screaming at the top of my lungs."
Doggie, a Shiba Inu, suffered a puncture in the right side of his neck under his ear, but he was up and eating on Thursday, Heinick said. He's 13 and Khloe's best friend, Heinick said. Last year, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and also suffers from seizures.
"My dog is basically deaf and he was turned around so he didn't even see the dog, and he didn't even hear it," Heinick said. "He didn't have a chance to fight back."
Heinick is very grateful to residents who ran out of their homes after the attack and two motorists who stopped and got out to help, one of whom ran across St. John Street to retrieve Doggie after he bolted.
"The people there, they kept her calm," she said of Khloe. "They tried to keep Doggie calm. I can't thank them enough. I don't know who they were, but they were angels that day."
Heinick dialed 911 and Easton police and the Easton Emergency Squad responded, rushing Khloe for treatment.
"It just keeps replaying in my head and I have her asking, 'Mommy, why was the dog so mean? Why did he do this to me. Are all dogs mean like him?'" Heinick said. "I keep telling her, 'I don't know. If I knew I would tell you.'"
Some are still open puncture wounds and her mother says the medical staff had to sedate Khloe so they could use 19 stitches to close the largest wound.
"She just keeps asking why, why is the dog so mean,” said Heinick. “We are animal lovers."
The tenant whose yard the dog ran out from claimed he didn't know whose dog it was.
69 News knocked on the door of the home at 153 Kleinhans Street, but no one would come to the door.
Easton animal control says they are investigating, but that doesn't help Heinick get closure
"Come forward, take responsibility, and give this child some justice,” said Heinick.
Heinick had been a defender of pit bulls, but that's changed.
"Unfortunately I've always been one to defend them and give them the benefit of the doubt, but after what I saw yesterday that might change -- because we did nothing," she said.
Heinick and Khloe had been walking with Doggie to take lunch to Heinick's boyfriend and Khloe's dad, James Rose, at his job on Hilton Street. She almost always carries pepper spray with her but didn't on Wednesday. Anyway, she was told afterward the spray would've likely had little effect on the dog and that she and Khloe would have gotten the worst of it.
"I was told it would piss the dog off" and that bear spray would be a better choice for self-defense against an attacking dog, Heinick said.
Thursday morning, when she let Doggie out, she was clutching a boxcutter, she said: "I didn't want to go out empty-handed."
"I took the dog out this morning and stood on the porch for 10 minutes looking around," Heinick said. "I just keep thinking the dog is going to run up behind me."
Heinick has lived in her home 13 years, and the day before the attack was the first time she'd seen that dog that attacked Khloe and Doggie. She'd long feared a dog attack after seeing strays in the past.
"It wasn't a loose pit bull. It was a a pit bull in a yard that ran out of his fenced-in yard," she said. "But we walk every day around South Side and we have had dogs come up to us, and it was something that's been in the back of my mind that came to reality."
VIDEO NEWS CLIP:
(WFMZ - August 18, 2017)
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