A Huntsville father and dog owner faces a charge of endangering the welfare of a child and is being held on a 10,000 cash-only bond.
This is the result of an afternoon left alone at home that led to his 13-year-old daughter requiring 5 surgeries after being attacked by seven dogs her family-owned.
An anonymous neighbor said the dogs were known by people in the area to be aggressive and claimed
He and others had attempted to file complaints about the dogs’ behavior previously.
“Just recently it got worse. So I contacted the sheriff’s office and the one person that I did know who lived at the house and the person that lived there said that he was going to get rid of the dogs the police told me that it was a city ordinance thing so there was nothing that they could do about it unless the dogs were actively attacking someone,” said the neighbor.
According to the probable cause statement, on the day of the incident, a neighbor noticed the attack from the window at around 1:10 p.m. And. Intervened with a baseball bat to distract the dogs while the victim ran to safety.
This resulted in several injuries being obtained by that intervening neighbor as well.
“I was walking out the door on my way to work and saw all of the cop cars lined up down the street,” said the anonymous neighbor
Because the city of Huntsville does not have a formal police department, the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department has been asked to enforce laws in Huntsville. However, the sheriff’s office reported that they only have the jurisdiction to enforce state laws and statutes in the area.
“We are still limited to the state laws because we are a sheriff’s department. The city can actually still enforce their ordinances,” said Randolph County Chief Deputy Officer Joe Harrison.
However, there is a state statute that states there must be two documented incidents of dob biting before action can be taken.
The probable cause statement involving this case also refers to an incident on December 13th but the sheriff’s office says there is no documentation of that incident on file.
“Sheriff Boggs and I and the current administration we took over January 1 so it wasn’t something that we were aware of as being a problem,” said Harrison
The city says it has not received any formal complaints of the canines’ presence before this incident and that those must be filled out through a form in city hall or through the sheriff’s department. They said they are only able to enforce aggressive animals staying out of the public eye and can not control what people do in their own homes.
“We also have an ordinance that tells if they have a vicious dog and they wish to keep it if it’s outside, they need to provide a safe pen where the dog cannot dig out or jump. Please come up and fill out paperwork, so that we can address that to those people. It’s hard to tell people what they can do in their own house. We do stress, too, in these cases if we know about it, that they make sure the dog can’t get out. You know that’s that’s about all we can do.”
Moving forward, the city of Huntsville looks to get help to mitigate these issues in the future.
At Thursday’s city council meeting, they discussed getting a co-enforcer for animal patrol.
As reported, any other instances of aggression from dogs or other animals should be formally filed at city hall to document the complaint or reported to the sheriff’s department.
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