QUINCY — As Jerod Welker laid on the ground in South Park while being mauled by three pit bulls on March 17, 2024, he had one thought.
“This is going to be how I die,” he said. “Unless someone somehow sees me and gets to me out here, I’m going to get killed by the dogs.”
A little more than a year later, Welker looks … well, good. It’s impossible to tell that he spent five nights at Blessing Hospital and missed about 2½ weeks of work at Transitions, where he works with people with disabilities.
The dogs eventually were captured and euthanized. The owner of the dogs received three city ordinance citations for dogs running “at large” and fined $250 for each citation. Welker says he has forgiven the dogs and the owner. He isn’t looking for an apology.
“It’s not necessary,” he said. “I am at peace with what happened.”
Helping him reach that peace was the creation of a YouTube documentary video with Andrew Sheeley, a college friend. Welker returns to the scene of the crime in the video, which has been viewed more than 11,000 times. He conducts interviews with the two Blessing Hospital surgeons, as well as former Adams County State’s Attorney Gary Farha and Sally Westerhoff from the Quincy Humane Society.
“I got the idea one day, and I thought, I’ll give him a call and tell him about it and see if he might be interested,” he said. “I told him about the story, and he was interested. We just took it from there.”
Out for a walk in South Park
Welker, 37, simply was in South Park, nearing the completion of his typical walk. He had seen the dogs earlier during his walk, and he noticed their owner was nowhere to be seen.
“I didn’t think much of it,” he said.
He was listening through his headphones to an audio book or music and walked up a hill in the park. He was turning around to go back down the hill, and the dogs had followed him.
“When I turned around, they started to attack me,” Welker said. “(The headphones are) why I didn’t hear them behind me, but it was like just a total shock, a total surprise.
“It’s tough to really remember details. Once they attacked me and were on me, and they were trying to bite me and claw me, and they were pulling me down. The memory of all the details from that is fairly blurry. It seemed like so much was happening at once.”
Remarkably, Welker escaped and ran.
“I believe God helped me get up,” he said.
He didn’t make it far, and the dogs caught him again.
“I gave up on yelling for help,” Welker said. “It seemed like the more I did that, the more fierce the dogs would get with me. And also, I was really exhausted. I was starting to accept that really, this is going to be it. I was just accepting that I was probably going to die. Maybe that’s why by the time the police got there, (the dogs were) circling me.”
A person, only referred to as Corey in the video, saved Welker’s life.
“Corey was in one of those houses (near South Park) and saw me through the window,” Welker said. “He didn’t really understand what was going on, but he knew something strange was happening. I mean, he didn’t even hear me. He just saw the visual. I was screaming as loud as I could over and over when I was up there. But luckily, he saw me, and he made the phone call.”
Doctor says Welker was less than 20 minutes from death
Dr. Dan Liesen, a Blessing Hospital surgeon, said in the YouTube documentary that if someone hadn’t seen Welker and the animals attacking him were not removed, he would not have been alive much longer.
“Maybe less than 20 minutes would be my guess because (the dogs) were going to finish him off in my mind,” Liesen said. “If (Corey) didn’t come in in short order, (Welker) was not going to be alive. He was going to lose his airway within probably 15 to 20 minutes, and then (he) would have died.”
Quincy Police video of the scene, included in the YouTube documentary, showed officers coming to assist Welker in the park. They discovered him facedown and naked with blood smeared all over his body.
The news of Welker’s attack didn’t garner much attention at the time. Most media outlets only offered three or four paragraphs from a Quincy Police Department press release, which said officers found the dogs circling “a male subject who was lying on the ground and severely injured.”
Multiple lacerations suffered all over his body by the dogs biting him have since healed. He was partially scalped, suffered a burst blood vessel in his neck and contracted rhabdomyolysis — a rare muscle injury and a life-threatening condition where your muscles break down — from deep tissue damage.
“I believe what (rhabdomyolysis) does is it releases some kind of damaging protein into your blood, which would have affected my kidneys and my liver,” Welker said.
His injuries were so severe that he had a breathing tube. He also spent time on a ventilator before beginning his recovery.
“It was definitely the worst animal attack I have ever witnessed,” LJ Helmke, a trauma surgeon at Blessing Hospital, said in the YouTube documentary. “To see somebody come in with hundreds of lacerations … from multiple dogs, it catches you off guard, because you don’t think about these things. These aren’t a one-bite kind of injury. These are massive, life-threatening injuries that can really end your life pretty quick, if not intervened with.”
“I mean, when we evaluated you, you were just mauled from head to toe,” Liesen said to Welker in the documentary. “The skin over your head, where your hair attaches into the scalp, was just multiple lacerations. … We were really worried about your left arm. We thought that it might have created enough swelling that you weren’t getting enough blood flow to your arm in order for it to live.
“It looked like you were whipped with some type of Roman whip.”
Deaths caused by dogs have forced owners in other states to face prison time
The euthanization of the dogs, along with the fines paid by the dog owner, pale in comparison to Welker’s suffering and hospital costs.
“It seems like once the animals are euthanized, problem solved. Well, it’s not, because we need to figure out how we prevent that going forward,” Westerhoff said in the video.
A legislator could learn about Welker’s story and begin the process to enact a bill that would strengthen the laws against dogs attacking people, but that process would likely take multiple years.
“People need to be more proactive with their elected officials,” Westerhoff said. “I think people are threatened to talk to their alderman or the mayor or the chief of police or your senator or your representative. I’ve been very active in legislation, and I commonly contact those people. They work for us. We need to let them know what we want them to do about these types of situations and not be passive and think we don’t have a role because we do.”
Deaths resulting in attacks like Welker’s are rare. The National Center for Health Statistics reported 468 people died in the United States from being bitten or struck by a dog between 2011 and 2021.
A Kansas City man died in January after he was mauled by multiple pit bulls in November as he was riding his bike in his neighborhood. The Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office said it was the first death by dog mauling in Kansas City history. A father and son were charged April 18 in connection to that attack. They were each charged with one count of first-degree involuntary manslaughter and one count of second-degree assault.
A Detroit man was sentenced in January to spend between 30 months and 15 years in prison after his dogs attacked and another man on Jan. 29, 2024, and died on Feb. 2, 2025. The man’s wife was sentenced to three years of probation. The couple’s three dogs escaped through an unsecured gate before attacking the man, a father of six kids who was returning home from a shopping trip.
Adams County State’s Attorney Todd Eyler said the Quincy City Council could vote to change the city ordinance to enhance penalties or punishment in dog-attack situations. He said the city ordinances mirror state law.
“Unfortunately, it’s only the really big and really bad cases that seem to get the attention of a legislator to make that move or to propose a change,” Eyler said. “Certainly this individual was injured severe enough that you would hope it would garner some attention.”
Recovering from mental anguish continues
When Welker was released from the hospital, his body was still puffy from all of the inflammation.
“My neck was huge,” Welker said. “Everything was bigger. But when that all went down, I felt like I was ready to go back to work.”
The recovery from the mental anguish was just as important — and has taken longer — as the physical healing. Reviewing the photos and videos, returning to the park, looking at the clothes he was wearing that were shredded by the dogs and talking about his experience has helped the process.
“It’s something I’m still figuring out myself, to be honest with you,” Welker said. “It’s tough to answer the physical and mental stuff. I feel like I’ve just been very fortunate and great lucky to have healed as well as I have.
“I hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be, if I’m just being straight up with you. If you asked me, ‘Jerod, you would you have preferred it have not happened at all?’, I would say, ‘No way.’ You can’t take away that experience from me. There’s no way I’d take that back. I would like to see this hopefully be less likely to happen to anyone ever again, but I would never take it back.”
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