PORT ORCHARD, WASHINGTON -- Two men were charged Tuesday with animal cruelty for shooting a high-maintenance puppy and leaving it in the bushes in a Port Orchard park.
The 5-month-old Labradoodle named Aubrey was found Monday near 1800 Sidney Avenue, which is part of Vanzee Memorial Park, after a neighbor heard the gunshot before 2 p.m. and then heard a dog whimpering and yelping.
Officers found the dog and a detective drove it to Kitsap Veterinary Hospital on Bethel Avenue, where it was stabilized and x-rayed. It was ultimately taken to the Kitsap Humane Society in Silverdale for emergency surgery.
A Facebook post Monday night from the Humane Society said the dog had been shot in the abdomen.
“We are optimistic about the dog's prognosis but would love if our followers could keep him in their thoughts tonight,” the post said.
Port Orchard Police Deputy Chief Dale Schuster said officers were lining up to adopt the puppy.
“It’s disturbing,” he said, adding that if the owner had taken the dog to the Humane Society it would have likely been re-adopted in short period of time.
As officers were canvassing the neighborhood, one found a folded-up traffic ticket for a 22-year-old man, Forrest Christian Smith, who lived nearby. His vehicle matched the description of a vehicle witnesses saw at the scene, according to court documents.
Officers went to the address and interviewed a roommate, who said Smith bought the dog about two months earlier and that since then the puppy had been “troublesome.”
Smith had not bothered to potty train (housebreak) Aubrey so she was having accidents inside the residence. Smith also wasn't bothering to take into consideration that she is a puppy and was allowing her to chew on furniture and other items.
Another roommate, A’Kinyelle Donald Thomas-Lewis, 21, said Smith was “unwilling to put up with the dog any longer” and admitted he and Smith had gone to the wooded area together and Smith shot the dog.
Officers noted Thomas-Lewis appeared confused by the investigation and behaved as though police were overreacting about the horrific animal cruelty, saying, “All this for a dog.”
Officers seized a 9 mm Glock handgun from the residence.
Smith was charged in Kitsap County Superior Court with first-degree animal cruelty; Thomas-Lewis was charged with accomplice to first-degree animal cruelty.
Kitsap Humane Society
April 30 at 10:38pm ·
Tonight our amazing veterinary team is staying late finishing up a long emergency surgery to save a dog that was shot this afternoon. The bullet had entered his abdomen and Animal Control Officers rushed him to KHS so he could get the lifesaving care he needed. This is what being on the front lines of animal welfare looks like- late nights, a dedication to lifesaving, and sometimes, a whole lot of blood. We are optimistic about the dog's prognosis but would love if our followers could keep him in their thoughts tonight.
TEXAS -- An elderly woman who had her arm ripped off and the right side of her face disfigured by a pit bull told the dog's owners during their sentencing on Monday that while as a Christian she must forgive them, she cannot forget.
A jury in San Antonio, Texas, on Monday found Alphonso McCloud, 27, and his wife, Staynelle Miles-McCloud, 31, guilty of felony charges of dangerous dog attack causing serious bodily injuries following four hours of deliberations.
During the punishment phase that followed the delivery of the guilty verdicts, the jurors sentenced McCloud to four years in prison and his wife to 10 years of probation for the vicious March 2017 dog attack that left 73-year-old Doris Mixon Smith severely maimed.
In her impassioned victim impact statement delivered after the sentencing, Mixon Smith ordered the McClouds to turn their attention to her, reported MySanAntonio.com.
"Look at me!" she shouted at the pair. "I'm missing an arm. God gave me two."
The victim accused McCloud, a decorated US Army veteran, of showing no remorse after his pit bull, Bully, darted out of his yard on March 6, 2017, and clamped down on her left arm as she was gardening, eventually tearing the limb out of its socket just below the elbow.
The animal also ripped the skin from the right side of the woman's face from the eyebrow to the chin.
‘As a Christian, I have to forgive you, but tell, me, how can I forget?’ she said. ‘I can no longer tie shoes, fasten my earrings, or dress myself.’
Mixon Smith lamented that in the wake of the mauling, she can no longer mow her own lawn, or even hold her pet dog in her arms.
When given a chance to speak, Alphonso McCloud defended himself, complaining that he has been unfairly portrayed on social media and in the news as a 'bad guy.'
'I've been blown up for my country,' McCloud said, referring to his military service. 'I am not a criminal.'
District Judge Joey Contreras raised the defendants’ bond amounts to $250,000 each and had them remanded to jail after learning from the prosecution that on the morning of the sentencing, two other pit bulls were photographed in the McClouds’ yard, in violation of an earlier court order that had prohibited them from owning any more dogs.
'The arrogance of the defendants is mind-boggling,' the judge told the court.
In her testimony last week, Mixon Smith described in graphic detail the horrifying dog attack.
The woman said she was gardening in her front yard when her neighbor's pit bull headed toward her with 'his mouth wide open', according to The Houston Chronicle.
'I said, 'Please help me, oh God, please help me,'' the 73-year-old victim recalled.
'He came at me as I was bent over with a pot in my hand,' Mixon Smith said of the March 6 attack.
'I was just fighting for my life, kicking and screaming, trying to get to my door to get my gun. He never turned me loose.'
Kenneth Baker, the couple's defense lawyer, told the jury last week that the pet was usually 'a good family dog' and never had a history of harming humans in the past.
Jurors were also shown surveillance footage of the five-minute canine assault, which was captured on video with a door bell camera, in addition to desperate 911 calls placed by neighbors.
In the video, the McClouds' young son is seen struggling to get the 70-pound Bully off of Mixon Smith and ordering the animal, 'Let go! Let go'
Once police arrive, the child begs the officers, 'Don't shoot my dog,' as they fire three rounds at the pit bull, leaving it twitching on the ground.
The jurors were also played a frantic 911 call placed by a neighbor, who is heard telling the dispatcher, 'There’s a pit bull attacking a lady outside! Come help this lady right now! Right now!'
Another neighbor also dialed 911, saying on the call, 'There lady is bleeding, the bone is showing! Oh, my God, someone get here , please!'
Mixon Smith suffered such catastrophic injuries that doctors were forced to remove her left arm just below the elbow. The skin and flesh was also torn from the eyebrow to the chin of her face.
'She tried to make it into her house, but that dog latched onto her left arm and it tore muscle and bone, and sinew such that the EMT’s, when they got there, clearly stated that it amputated her arm,' state prosecutor Daryl Harris told the jury during opening remarks in the case.
When police arrived, they shot the dog three times in order to stop the gory assault.
TEXAS -- “Please help me. Oh God, please help me,” Doris Mixon Smith told a jury here Friday, recalling what she said as a 70-pound pit bull charged at her, “mouth wide open.”
As she testified, she lifted her left arm to show the panel what remains of the limb, severed by the bites and tears from the dog, named “Bully.”
The dog was owned by former neighbors Alphonso McCloud and his wife Stanyelle Miles-McCloud, who are accused of serious bodily injury in the attack.
Mixon Smith, who was 72, was working on a flower bed in front of her far West Side home in the 8900 block of Mansfield on March 6 when she said the dog somehow got out of his yard and attacked her.
“He came at me as I was bent over with a pot in my hand,” she said. “I was just fighting for my life, kicking and screaming, trying to get to my door to get my gun. He never turned me loose.”
Mixon Smith, now 73, testified the day after jurors heard the woman’s screams, a child crying and the caller cursing in a chilling 911 call and watched the grisly attack, which lasted at least five minutes and was captured on video from a doorbell camera.
The recording showed the dog’s jaw locked onto her arm, violently shaking and breaking it, while a crying child yells, “Let go! Let go,” as he hit the animal with a stick. The video ends shortly after a San Antonio police officer shot and killed the animal.
A retiree who has lived in the Tara subdivision for 33 years, Mixon Smith said she is very particular and has a weekly routine that involves gardening twice a week, volunteering and helping friends twice a week, and “church, football and golf” on Sundays.
She is known for letting neighbors know when their yards need attention and said she routinely mowed the lawns of her neighbors when she did hers — including her next-door neighbors, McCloud and Miles-McCloud.
Mixon Smith testified that whenever she mowed her lawn or used her weed eater, the dog would bark, jump up on the fence and run up and down the fence line.
She also said she alerted the owners whenever the dog would get out of the yard and recalled that McCloud put a lock on the gate.
The day of the attack, she said the lock was missing and the dog nearly got out of the gate while she was mowing her yard. She used her lawnmower to hold the gate closed while she alerted a female relative in the home.
“I said, ‘Sweetie, you need to come get the dogs inside or put the lock on the gate,’ and she told me she was afraid of the dogs but would tell somebody,” Mixon Smith said.
She then took her lawnmower to the garage since the dog was no longer at the gate.
About three hours later, she started planting in her garden.
When the dog charged over the corner of her flower bed, “he grabbed this arm,” she said as she raised her left limb and showed what remained. “I realized seven days later he tore off my face.”
Prosecutor Daryl Harris showed Mixon Smith a photograph of her porch taken the afternoon of the attack.
“Oh, my God. I haven’t seen this,” she said. “I was trying to get to my door to get my gun.”
Mixon Smith said she passed out, but the child in the video, later identified as the 10-year-old son of the McCloud and Miles-McCloud, was her “hero.”
“He came over with a stick,” she said. “God covered me because that little boy kept saying, ‘Let the lady go.’”
An Animal Care Services investigator, Jennifer Fried, testified that after the attack, two more dogs were seized from the McClouds after Mixon Smith reported that they had another pit bull in the backyard, in addition to a Rhodesian ridgeback. The ridgeback ended up being euthanized because it was deemed dangerous.
US ARMY VETERANS RESPONSIBLE FOR ELDERLY WOMAN'S FACE AND ARM "BEING RIPPED OFF" BY THEIR PIT BULL
The couple, both Army veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, met while in combat. They each testified Friday under questioning by their own attorneys.
McCloud, 28, testified that Mixon Smith was “kind.”
“She was like a mother away from home,” he said. “I was raised by my grandmother — it was the same feeling. She was always on me about the lawn, my trash, things of that nature.”
He said she also was always in his yard but that he neither granted permission nor prevented her from mowing it if she wanted.
OWNER CLAIMS SURPRISE THAT HIS PIT BULL IS KILLER
When asked by his attorney, Kenneth Baker, whether he ever saw Bully get out of the yard or have problems with neighbors or if he was a dangerous dog, McCloud replied, “No, sir, he’s a very loving dog.”
McCloud said he put a lock on the outside latch of the gate but admitted he “got tired” of removing it every time someone came to mow his backyard.
“I took the lock off and put a metal rod in,” he said. “I bent it and twisted it so (Bully) couldn’t get out.
PREVIOUS ATTACKS BY "LOVING" PIT BULL
McCloud disputed reports that Bully bit a “cable guy” at their home and one of their nieces before the attack on Mixon Smith.
Fried, the ACS investigator, testified earlier that Bully was quarantined for two weeks after the report that he bit the cable guy in October 2016.
Miles-McCloud, when questioned about Bully by her attorney, Edith Brown, testified she was the one who found the dog on Facebook and had spent time with him and saw how he was with the children at his previous home. Had he been dangerous, she said, she would not have taken him.
ON THE STAND, STANYELLE MILES-MCCLOUD CALLS HER NIECE A LIAR
“We met with Bully and had no concerns,” Miles-McCloud said, who also disputed the biting reports, stating that their niece “lies.”
She also said MINIMIZED THE ATTACK, CLAIMING the cable guy suffered a scratch, not a bite.
After the incident with the cable guy, Miles-McCloud said, she and her husband discussed whether they should keep the pit bull, but she said they ultimately decided to keep Bully because she never heard or saw anything that indicated the dog was aggressive.
She told the jury she didn’t know Mixon Smith as well as her husband, and had brief interactions, but that her children told her they didn’t like the way Mixon Smith treated them or Bully.
When asked by Brown how their son shown in the video was coping, she said he was “torn.”
“He’s torn between the loss of his dog and what happened to Ms. Mixon Smith,” Miles-McCloud said.
If he beat the dog off this woman, I don't think he cares about this mauler one bit.
McCloud and Miles-McCloud are being tried together and have asked for probation. If convicted, each faces two to 20 years and a $10,000 fine for dangerous dog attack-serious bodily injury, a third-degree felony.
The state rested its case and the defense is presenting evidence. Testimony is expected to resume Monday in the 187th state District Court, presided by Judge Joey Contreras.
TEXAS -- “Let go! Let go!” the boy cried in a video shown in court Thursday as he used a stick to try to stop a 70-pound pit bull named “Bully” that dragged, chewed, broke and tore at an elderly San Antonio woman’s arm until a police officer shot the dog to death.
The graphic images were taken from the doorbell of Doris Mixon Smith, who was 72 on March 6, 2017, when her next-door neighbors’ pet somehow got out of its yard and attacked her — for at least five minutes — as she was gardening.
Mixon Smith’s arm was severed just below the elbow, and the skin and flesh on the right side of her face was ripped and torn, from the eyebrow to her chin.
Stanyelle Miles-McCloud and Alphonso McCloud, the dog’s owners, are on trial, accused of serious bodily injury and not securing the animal in their yard in a horrific case involving a dangerous dog attack in a city where roaming and loose animals are considered to be a growing problem.
Jurors wept as they watched the short three-part video, entered into evidence by prosecutor Daryl Harris. It began with Mixon Smith on the ground, with the dog’s jaw locked on her arm. The video camera in the doorbell was activated when she told the child to push the button.
Stanyelle Miles-McCloud and Alphonso McCloud's son cried as he hit the dog and commanded it to let go, but it wouldn’t as neighbors watched in shock.
It dragged Mixon Smith and violently shook its head with her arm in its mouth. Streaks of blood were visible on her front porch on what was a sunny afternoon in the 8900 block of Mansfield on the far West Side.
Once police arrived, the child was heard saying, “Don’t shoot my dog,” as three shots were fired. The dog twitched after it was shot, and the last image was of Mixon Smith’s body nearby, part of her arm missing.
Before the grisly images were shown, jurors heard recordings of two chilling 911 calls from a neighbor, who can be heard frantically yelling expletives as he tried to get police and emergency medical technicians to quickly respond.
“There’s a pit bull attacking a lady outside! Come help this lady right now! Right now!” said the scared caller.
In the background, his children’s screams and those of Mixon Smith could be heard.
In a second call, the frantic neighbor tells his children, who are crying, to stay away from the window as he pleads for police to come.
“The lady is bleeding, the bone is showing! Oh, my God, someone get here please! I don’t know what to (expletive) do!”
Shortly after police arrive, the caller can be heard on the recording telling them, “Shoot it! Shoot it! Shoot that (expletive) thing. (Expletive. Expletive. Expletive. Expletive),” as gunshots are heard in the background.
Oscar Linares, a Fire Department emergency medical technician who was one of the first on scene, told the jury he has responded to many calls for a dog bite, but that Mixon Smith’s injuries were like none he had ever seen.
“The lady was lying on her back and had a tourniquet up high (on her arm), she had a left arm amputation, injuries around her face and breathing problems,” he said.
Linares used a pointer on crime scene photographs in front of a projector screen behind Judge Joey Contreras to show the extent of Mixon Smith’s injuries.
Linares said she was bitten “through and through on the face,” and looked as if the skin and flesh had been ripped off from her eyebrow to her chin, exposing the muscle. Her arm, severed by the dog’s teeth, left an exposed artery.
Linares, who stood in front of a projector screen behind Judge Joey Contreras, showed the jury areas where the muscle on the right side of the victim’s face was visible and where it had been torn and ripped.
The pair, who pleaded not guilty, are being tried together and are out on bond.
Defense attorney Kenneth Baker, representing Alphonso McCloud, told the jury in his opening statement that no one knows exactly how the dog escaped the yard. He said both defendants are liked by their neighbors and that no one else on the block had issues with “Bully.”
He said although the incident is tragic and “horrible,” the dog was protecting his property because Mixon Smith was known to mow the McClouds’ lawn when they had not, which a neighbor who lives across the street confirmed in testimony.
ATTORNEY KENNETH BARKER IS A CRETIN
Baker also told the panel that “Bully” acted out because of his memory of Mixon Smith, whom Baker said would antagonize the animal with the lawnmower each time she mowed the lawn and would park it against the fence with the motor running.
This is called "blaming the victim" for having their face and arm ripped off by a Pit Bull.
Prosecutors Harris and Nicole Phillips said Mixon Smith had a history of complaining to the McClouds about their dog getting loose, and that the fence was not secured with a lock.
They said the dog also had bitten at least two other people.
Photographs taken at the scene by police showed a wire used to secure the inside of the gate from the backyard, and deep holes in the ground near the fence where a dog could escape.
Testimony from a neighbor across the street indicated that the day Mixon Smith was attacked, no lock was on the outside part of the gate.
Roaming animals are considered to be a growing problem in the Alamo City. Last year, Animal Care Services issued more than 11,000 citations to owners whose pets were found roaming. The agency estimates that more than 13,000 will be issued in 2018.
ACS spokeswoman Lisa Norwood said there are a number of “bites” cases that occur each year, but “attack by dog” cases that cause serious bodily injury, such as in the McCloud case, are rare.
She said 36 dangerous dog cases were filed in fiscal year 2017, and of those, 15 required hospitalization for serious bodily injuries. Twenty-three cases have been filed with nine requiring hospitalization for serious bites so far for fiscal year 2018.
A dangerous dog attack that causes severe bodily injury is a third-degree felony, punishable by two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
Testimony is expected to resume this morning in 187th state District Court.
