Dog attack almost killed Columbus girl. Now, her mom mom wants changes
A summer playdate turned into a nightmare for Avery Russell, 11, when two pit bulls attacked her. Avery, who lost both ears, faces years of recovery.
Drew Russell could barely understand her daughter’s friend on the phone that day. The panicked girl tried to relay that her only child, Avery Russell, had been bitten by dogs.
The 11-year-old girl passed the phone to a neighbor, a man with little information about the chaotic scene. He handed the phone to Reynoldsburg Police Officer Nicholas Lewis.
“Just tell me if my daughter’s alive,” Drew said.
“I can’t tell you that,” Lewis told her. Then he added: “Don’t come here. Meet us at Children’s.”
Drew flew down I-70, hitting 120 miles an hour and praying a cop would pull her over and take her to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
Avery is her everything. A sweet, smart and loving 11-year-old girl with a knack for computer coding and math.
By the time Drew ran into the trauma bay, teams of nurses, doctors and paramedics swarmed her child. A chaplain, Rev. Kelsie Meyers, stepped in front of Drew. The look on Meyers’ face told Drew that it was bad. Real bad.
“No one had told me anything. So, I still had no idea the severity of the situation,” Drew said. “Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.”
Two pit bulls, Apollo and Layla, chewed off most of Avery’s ears, ripped into her nose, left a huge gouge above her left eye and punctured her forehead and shoulder. Her face looked like ground hamburger.
“My reaction was like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s not my child!'” Drew recalled. “I was fully in shock. I could never have fathomed that that call would lead to that.”
Avery’s left eye was swollen shut, so Drew leaned in close to her right side. She wanted Avery to know she was with her.
“If you can hear mommy’s voice, squeeze my hand,” Drew told her 11-year-old, fighting for her life.
Avery gave her mom’s hand a little squeeze.
Before surgeons began what would be a nine-hour operation, putting Avery’s face back together like a jigsaw puzzle, Drew pleaded with them:
“Just save my daughter. Just save her. Save her. Just please save her and bring my baby back to me.”
‘Our whole life has literally been flipped’
Three months after the brutal mauling, Drew is steaming with anger. She’s mad at the dogs’ owner. She’s upset with the plodding pace of prosecution.
She’s angry that one of the two dogs is still alive. She calls it shameful that the dog owner, Stephanie Ayers, asked the court to give her back her dog.
“My daughter almost died. And our whole life has literally been flipped. Nothing looks the same as it did six months ago,” she said.
Drew can’t sleep. Every time she shuts her eyes, she sees Avery’s torn and bloody face. She quit her job and closed her nail salon so she could care for Avery.
The calendar is packed with therapy appointments: physical, speech, occupational, feeding, trauma, burn and scar. Even after four surgeries, Avery still needs new ears and a new nose. Everything so far has been reconstructive, not cosmetic.
The mother mourns the loss of her daughter’s happy childhood. The physical scars, though extensive, pale in comparison to the mental trauma.
The fear, flashbacks and PTSD are constantly lurking, ready to erupt. Dogs in public bring on intense panic for Avery. Drew can’t even say the word “dog” around Avery.
Even the best laid plans to protect Avery get derailed. Drew and Avery’s mental health team wanted to prepare her before the child would see the damage to her face. But Avery caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror long before she was ready. Avery didn’t recognize herself.
Now when she looks in the mirror, she says: “Mommy, how long do I have to look like this? Why did this have to happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?”
Drew has no good answers. “I feel so helpless in this whole situation because there is nothing I can do to make it better.”
Therapy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital
Avery grabs a red foam rod that looks like a Twizzler and uses both hands to twist it into opposite directions. Her slender wrists flex as physical therapist Jim Falk watches. He runs her through more progressive resistance exercises that will help her with everyday tasks, like opening a bottle, drinking from a glass and tying her hair back into a ponytail.
When Drew intervenes too much, Avery gives a drawn-out groan. “Moooooom.”
“These are essential life skills, especially with all that hair,” Drew says.
Falk, who focuses on hand therapy, runs Avery through more tasks. “Her strength is actually going up, even though she’s getting tired.”
“I’m proud of you, Boo,” Drew tells her.
Falk then gives Avery a head nod toward the basketball half-court that is part of a new physical therapy area at Nationwide Children’s. “You ready?”
She smiles and skips over to the bin of basketballs. She dribbles one to the free-throw line. Basketball is her true love. Avery can’t wait for the school basketball season to start up again in November. It’s something to work toward.
Avery hurls the ball toward the basket, hitting the rim but missing. She fluidly makes a couple of layups and returns to the line. Avery sinks a couple of shots, grinning a crooked smile.
Two months before this October appointment, Avery couldn’t throw the ball anywhere close to the rim. She just didn’t have the strength and stamina.
Avery bounds through the hallway and lobby. By now she knows her way through the sprawling building to her next two appointments: speech and physical therapy.
“How was school today? Any trouble being understood in the classroom over the last few weeks? And how do you feel about your volume when you’re talking?” the speech therapist asks Avery.
Avery, suddenly quiet and shy, gives the therapist a so-so hand signal. The two go over strategies to increase speech fluency and volume.
She sounded like a mild mouse when she awoke from surgery and hospital staff removed the intubation. The speech therapist worked with Avery, helping her re-learn how to chew and eat. Still, lasting nerve damage means she can’t feel her nose running or when she has food on part of her face.
Drew said Avery, who has autism, has always been a quiet talker but had made strides toward speaking up. Then the attack and trauma set her back. Drew tells her daughter she wants her to speak up. “You have important things to say.”
In her physical therapy session, Avery is keen to beat her own records. Her competitive streak shows. On a one-leg bridge pose, she starts to get shaky.
“You got it, Avery, you got it. You’re already past your high score,” her therapist says.
“I don’t even know my high score,” Avery says.
“It’s 17 seconds. You’re at 39 now.”
Avery drops her butt to the mat, satisfied.
The session marks her last one over four months. The therapist tells Avery to do her PT exercises at home. “You’ll be a better basketball player.”
Avery may be done with PT for now, but she faces years of procedures and rehab.
“I was just told that she’s probably going to have to get what’s left of her ears removed so that they can give her new ones,” Drew said. “So, yeah, she has a long road ahead. Probably going to take years before she’s back to herself, and she probably never will be back to the way she was before.”
Drew is hoping that a year from now, Avery will have a new nose and ears.
“In 10 years, I’m hoping that this becomes a distant memory and that she is able to be an advocate and use her testimony to help other kids get through traumatic things,” Drew said.
Two pit bulls, a power washer and a cop
Drew rarely let Avery go on play dates with anyone but close friends and family. She was protective of Avery ever since doctors diagnosed her with autism spectrum disorder around age 7.
But on the day of the attack, Drew dropped Avery off at her friend Kiera’s house around 8:45 a.m. and headed to work in Westerville. Kiera and Avery are friends from school.
Jessica Henry, Kiera’s mom, called Drew that afternoon to let her know she’d be taking the girls to her cousin’s place in Reynoldsburg. Drew didn’t know about the four pit bulls at the house. She didn’t know that the Reynoldsburg neighbors considered the dogs aggressive and menacing.
And Drew didn’t know that Ayers’ dogs previously had bitten two of Henry’s children − one in the arm, another in the face − less than a year before this. Ayers and Henry knew, according to the police report, but they still had Avery and Kiera over for the play date.
That afternoon, the girls went inside the house to use the bathroom. That’s when the two adult dogs and two puppies cornered Avery, barking and growling at her. Henry said she placed her body between Avery and the two pit bulls but when she tried to open a door to let Avery slip out, one of the dogs bit Henry in the forearm.
Terrified, Avery bolted to the backyard. The dogs chased after her.
Henry said when she tried to save Avery, the dogs attacked her − biting Henry’s arms, chest, shoulder, ear and throat. They took off a chunk of her ear.
“They got my throat and I thought for sure I was about to die. My daughter was standing there, she watched it,” said Henry, 37, a mother of five.
Working from home that day, Kevin Messenger heard the kids playing and dogs barking in the yard next door. It was part of the soundtrack of the neighborhood. But something wasn’t right this time.
Looking out the window, he said he saw one of the pit bulls violently yank a woman in the backyard. Most of the kids scattered. Two pit bulls latched onto Avery, tugging her like a rag doll.
Messenger later told police in a statement: “The neighbor dogs have always been kind of aggressive: Apollo growling at me across the fence, both adult dogs attacking and damaging the fence in between us and even causing some minor injuries to my own dog.”
Neighbors called 911 and pounded on the wooden privacy fence. A child threw dog treats into the yard, hoping to distract them. The dogs dragged Avery deeper into the backyard.
Zachary Ruff, who was power washing a nearby house, heard children screaming and saw two pit bulls chewing on Avery’s face. He dashed back to his equipment, grabbed the hose and sprayed water at the dogs. His quick action interrupted the grisly attack.
Just outside the fence, a breathless woman frantically told Reynoldsburg Police Officer Scott Manny: “One of the kids isn’t moving. The adult is moving. Don’t know where the dog is.”
Manny called in an “officer in trouble” signal, glanced through the slats in the fence, unholstered his Glock and shoved open the gate. A blast from the power washer caused the large, tan pit bull to back off of Avery. It charged toward Manny.
The officer squeezed off three quick shots, hitting the dog and sending it back into the house, yelping. He closed the door to the back porch.
“Radio, I got two down in the back yard in bad shape. One dog shot. Inside the house,” Manny told dispatchers.
Shaken by the grisly scene, the officer donned latex gloves as Avery whimpered. Her face was so ripped apart that Manny couldn’t tell if she was a boy or girl.
“Most of her face was either torn off or torn open,” he wrote in his report later.
He scooped the girl up and carried her to the front of the house, where Truro Township paramedics awaited.
“We didn’t know what was going on. It was so chaotic. Officer Manny came out with her in his arms,” said Truro Twp. Firefighter-Paramedic Mick Pfaff. “We got her in the truck and – whoosh – off to the hospital.”
In his entire 17-year career, Pfaff said he’d never seen such severe injuries on a child.
“It’s never easy to see a child suffering like that.”
Pfaff and his colleagues started a GoFundMe for Drew and Avery. He later visited Avery at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, after surgeons spent nine hours rebuilding her face. Pfaff said the repairs were nothing short of amazing. “If you’d seen where she was that day, you’d be shocked.”
After the attack, Ayers, the dog owner, paced the sidewalk outside her house. A police body camera captured Ayers showing more concern for her dogs than for Avery, who at the time was in critical condition.
“Like do I think this is right? F— no. Am I okay with any of this?,” Ayers said. “No. I’m not saying that I think that my dog did the right thing. None of that. But my dog doesn’t deserve to be sitting there f—— suffering. The little girl ain’t laying there suffering still.”
Now Avery’s days are marked by surgeries, medical appointments, sixth-grade classes, basketball games and questions about her future.
“My daughter’s whole life has changed. She is 11 years old. She has to live with this her whole life,” Drew said.
Drew is more worried about Avery’s mental health. Already, she sees her self-confidence diminished. And high school is just around the corner.
“My prayer is that she’ll look somewhat normal by the time she’s good and ready to go to high school. Because that’s when kids get the meanest. And that’s when your hormones start to develop and your emotions are all over the place,” Drew said. “As her mom, I worry about how she is mentally.”
A demand for reform
Drew hired Columbus attorney Bill Patmon to find out what happened, press for criminal charges, pursue a civil case and advocate for changes in state law.
They plan to ask lawmakers to adopt reforms that they believe will bring more accountability for owners and justice for victims and deter irresponsible behavior by dog owners.
“If we don’t fight or try to affect some kind of change, then what’s it all for? What’s all the suffering for? Because it’s just going to keep happening,” Drew said.
Their starting point: allow felony charges against dog owners who knew their animals could be dangerous, enhance penalties when children are the victims, require insurance coverage for dog ownership, expand responsibilities for local dog wardens, add harsher penalties in cases of serious injuries and mandate euthanasia for dogs after the first kill.
Currently, violations of Ohio’s dog laws are misdemeanors, punishable with fines and restrictions for handling the dog in the future. The fines start at $25 and putting a dog down isn’t mandated until it’s killed a second person.
“As a human, you go out and you kill someone, you’re mandated by law to spend the rest of your life in prison, right? You don’t get the opportunity to kill a second person. So, why would we allow an animal to do that? That’s crazy. And maybe that’s why the other dog hasn’t been put down,” Drew said.
After the attack on Avery, neighbors told the cops about how they’d seen the dogs acting aggressively in the past. But none of that got reported to police or the dog warden. That makes it harder for victims of serious attacks to argue that the owners should face more consequences.
“They’re saying because these dogs have never been reported as vicious, they can’t label them as such. And I just think, excuse my language, that’s a crock of s—,” Drew said. “Just look at her….They didn’t just nip at her little leg or her arm. No, they went straight for her jugular. They attacked to kill her.”
Jessica Henry lived with her cousin and the dogs for several months. Stephanie Ayers, the cousin, has custody of two of Henry’s five children. Henry knew the dogs to be territorial and barked at strangers but said she didn’t know that the dogs had bitten her two kids who live with Ayers.
Ayers and her attorney have declined comment.
Now, Henry wants Ohio’s dog laws changed to impose more serious penalties when dogs viciously attack people, including automatic euthanasia. “It’s a dog. If it did it once, it’s going to do it again and next time, somebody may not survive.”
Drew acknowledges that law changes are unlikely to fix all the problems of irresponsible dog ownership. But she said: “If you don’t try and start somewhere, then it’s just going to remain the same.”
Other attorneys who take dog bite cases say Ohio shelters should be required to maintain and share better records on dogs’ histories before adopting them out to new owners.
Patmon knows his way around the Ohio General Assembly and dog laws. His father served two terms in the Ohio House and carried a bill to make animal cruelty and abuse a felony.
Drew finds it paradoxical that it’s a felony to abuse a pet but not a felony for a pet to disfigure a child.
“I have to see this every time I look at my baby. I barely recognize her,” Drew said. “It’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not okay.”
No ‘picture day’ for Avery
Drew suggested homeschooling Avery for sixth grade this year. Avery insisted on going back to class and being with her friends.
St. Catharine School is like a protective nest for Avery. Most of her classmates and a few teachers visited her during her month in the hospital.
Still, the new Avery isn’t the old Avery. She didn’t want to go to picture day at school. Drew gave her a mental health day. No point in making the disfigured child watch all her friends enjoy smiling for school pictures.
“Rather than put her through that and to cause more trauma onto the trauma, I let her stay home. She got a free day.”
Avery’s father has never been in her life and still isn’t, even after Drew told him about the attack, she said. But Drew’s parents, sister, cousins, close friends and the “Super Moms” at Avery’s school support them at every step.
“It’s very hard for me to ask for help and admit when we need it. I’m working on it and getting a bit better,” Drew said. “This situation has taught me that, but it’s really easy to have all the support in the world and still feel alone.”
Laura Bischoff is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.
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