Showing posts with label pit bulls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pit bulls. Show all posts

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Report: Police kill a pit bull during a domestic abuse call on Avenue D

During a domestic abuse call last night in the Lillian Wald Houses, police shot and killed a pit bull that attacked one of the officers, the Daily News reports.

The chaotic scene unfolded around 9 last night on the 10th floor of 30 Avenue D.

The crazed pit bull sunk its teeth into the bottom of one officer’s vest – prompting his partner to whip out his gun and kill the dog with one shot, cops said.

Meanwhile, according to the News, a man in the apartment led police on a foot chase that ended on Avenue B and East Houston, where cops subdued the man with a stun gun.

One witness said the man, surrounded by cops, was screaming and flailing until police used the stun gun.

“It was like prime-time TV,” the witness said.

According to the News, the man struck a 30-year woman, believed to be his niece, during a family fight. The woman then called 911. Charges are reportedly pending.

Police also used a tranquilizer on a second pit bull inside the apartment and delivered the dog to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, per the report.

A tenant who lives upstairs said she heard barking and a woman’s wails, followed by a loud bang.

“The dog was barking and the woman screamed, and then a single shot,” she told the Daily News. “You hear all sorts of things in the projects. Usually you don’t pay any mind. But this was crazy!”

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

There have been 3 big dog attacks in the East Village this month


[Reader photo from Aug. 1]

On Aug. 1, Roberta Bailey was taking her pug, Sidney, to Washington Square Park. Outside her apartment on St. Mark's Place between Second Avenue and Third Avenue, a pit bull with a crusty/traveler who was asleep, lunged at Sidney.

Here's The Villager with the narrative:

“People were bashing the dog on his head with a stick,” she said. “Someone screamed to me, ‘Grab the balls!’ and I squeezed that dog’s balls as hard as I could. He didn’t let go. I tried to pick up his legs, which I was told you’re supposed to do.

Sidney, who was 14, did not survive the attack. You can read the full story here at The Villager, who first reported on the incident. (An EVG reader came across the aftermath of the attack on Aug. 1 and shared the above photo. At the time, the reader was unsure of what happened except for that it was a dog attack.)

In the early morning hours of Aug. 5, Michael Puzzo says he was walking his girlfriend's dog Bobito, a 10-year-old, 9-pound Havanese-Maltese mix, on East Sixth Street near Second Avenue. He spotted a man and his brindle-brown pit bull asleep in the middle of the sidewalk, as Gothamist reported yesterday.

Puzzo says that he started to walk around the "situation" as slowly as possible, but that the dog opened its eyes as soon as Puzzo and his dog came close ("like when you come across a sleeping vampire," Puzzo analogized). "I yanked my dog's harness up like a fuzzy yo-yo and blocked the pit's mouth with my arm," Puzzo said. "It … was pretty fucking bloody and painful. To be bitten by a dog is a very strange feeling. It felt like someone had lit my arm on fire."

Puzzo told Gothamist that he wasn't sure how long the dog had his right arm. The pit bull's owner immediately woke up and eventually got the dog away from Puzzo. Read the whole article here.

Later on Aug. 5, Ed Vassilev was taking Misha, his Vizsla — a Hungarian midsize-breed dog — for a walk on Second Avenue between East Fourth Street and East Fifth Street "when a male pit bull down the block — next to two crusties slumped on the sidewalk, possibly nodding out — set its sights on the smaller dog. The black-and-white pit suddenly took off on a dead run down the empty pavement. It didn’t bark or growl — it just came silently speeding like a missile straight toward them."

As The Villager reported last Thursday:

“It was like from 50 feet away,” Vassilev told The Villager. “That dog saw my dog. He wasn’t on a leash. I picked up my dog. When he jumped up and bit me, it was like it was in slow motion. He got a chunk of my arm. It was brutal. It wasn’t a nip — he bit through my arm,” Vassilev said.

Vassilev, who had to spend several nights at Beth Israel, likely has permanent nerve damage in his left arm.

Read the full article here.

Four days after The Villager reported on this attack, the Post had a story on it yesterday… even stamping the article as an exclusive.



In this version of the story:

All of it could have been avoided if de Blasio were addressing the city’s rising homeless problem, he said.

“A couple of years back, there were homeless people, but I would see the same faces,” Vassilev said.

There wasn't any mention of the mayor in The Villager's version.

As for a dog biting a person, The Villager reports that it is not considered a criminal offense — it's a civil offense.

Updated the headline after multiple readers questioned whether these were actually pit bulls involved in the attacks. The Villager, Gothamist and the Post all identified the dogs as pit bulls.