Documentary: Victims of dog attacks not protected in Ohio
Ohio law allows vicious dogs to kill twice before they’re required to be put down. Hear the stories of dog attack victims and their calls for changes.
By the fall of 2024, everyone on Kildow Court knew the dogs were dangerous.
The two pit bulls, Apollo and Echo, sometimes ran free among the condominiums in the Ashville neighborhood, growling, barking and menacing neighbors. Once, Apollo attacked a woman who was out for a walk, killing her dog and leaving her with broken bones and cuts.
The condo association sent letters to the dogs’ owners, Susan Withers and her son, Adam, demanding they get rid of the dogs. It imposed fines and filed a civil lawsuit in Pickaway County.
Nothing worked. Even after the first documented attack, a judge allowed the Withers to keep their dogs after they paid a $25 fine and put up “Beware of Dog” signs.
One sign wasn’t visible from the patio. Another small sign, about the size of a bumper sticker, was still hanging in a window of the Withers’ condo near Circleville when 73-year-old Jo Ann Echelbarger, their next-door neighbor, went outside to work in her garden on Oct. 17, 2024.
Apollo and Echo pounced, viciously attacking Echelbarger. Her husband, Stanley, 84, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, watched helplessly from the screened-in porch as the dogs mauled his wife, breaking her neck, tearing her scalp and leaving her covered in blood. She died within minutes.
“It’s just unfathomable,” Tasha Rogers, Echelbarger’s daughter-in-law, said weeks later. “She had no chance.”
Dog attack fines in Ohio are akin to a traffic ticket
What happened to Echelbarger is the worst-case scenario: Ohio averages about two fatal dog attacks a year. But a nine-month investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Akron Beacon Journal and The Canton Repository found it is a symptom of a larger problem, one that threatens the safety and health of thousands of Ohioans every year.
Time and again, gruesome attacks like the one that killed Echelbarger happen despite warnings, complaints and previous attacks that went unheeded by dog owners and unpunished by the legal system.
If a person tears off someone’s ear or nose in a bar brawl, jail time is almost certain. If they kill someone, they will likely go to prison for years. But under Ohio law, the owner of a dog that disfigures or even kills someone is likely to pay a fine that’s little more than a traffic ticket.
The law also does not require that a vicious dog be euthanized after such an attack, even if it results in a fatality.
Only after a dog kills two people does Ohio law require that it be put down.
Former state lawmaker Bill Beagle, a Tipp City Republican who tried unsuccessfully to make the law tougher, said vicious dogs get “one free growl, one free bite and one free kill” before the dog or its owner face serious consequences.
In some respects, state law treats dogs better than victims of dog attacks. Mistreating a dog – animal cruelty – can be a felony in Ohio. A vicious dog attack is a misdemeanor in almost every case.
And the attacks often are very serious.
Dogs bite about 17,000 people a year in Ohio severely enough to require medical attention or to prompt calls to law enforcement. Experts estimate the actual total is double that, because so many bites go unreported. Often people don’t even know they’re supposed to report bites. And public health agencies don’t categorize bite reports by how serious they are, leaving a gap in understanding the scope of the problem.
The victims, many of them children like Avery Russell of Columbus, are left with both physical and emotional scars. Some are horribly disfigured. Others lose limbs or suffer injuries so serious they can no longer work or perform simple tasks without help. Medical bills can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
After Savannah Coleman, an 8-year-old from Dayton, was mauled by a dog six years ago, she underwent multiple surgeries. Her mother, Tierney Dumont, was stunned by the lack of consequences under Ohio law.
While Savannah struggled to recover and medical bills mounted, the dog’s owners paid a $120 fine.
“It’s a very frustrating process,” Dumont said. “When you’re seeing your child mauled, could’ve easily died, and then no one wants to be held accountable.”
Missed chances to seize the vicious dogs
The many flaws in Ohio’s dog laws opened the door to tragedy in the months and days before Echelbarger’s death. Weak enforcement. Inadequate penalties. A failure to take seriously a looming danger.
Despite multiple opportunities to intervene before the fatal attack, no one did.
A year before Apollo and Echo mauled Echelbarger, Kimberlee Black encountered Apollo while walking her golden doodle puppy, Nemo, in the neighborhood around Kildow Court.
The pit bull went after both Black and her puppy. Black suffered lacerations and four broken bones, and she had to euthanize Nemo because the puppy’s injuries were so severe.
Black filed a complaint with the Pickaway County dog warden and assumed authorities would move quickly to address the threat posed by the Withers’ dogs. She soon learned otherwise.
In the months that followed, authorities gave Adam and Susan Withers leeway again and again. They did not have to euthanize Apollo. They didn’t have to buy liability insurance. They paid only a $25 fine and were ordered to get a dangerous dog license, keep the dogs muzzled and leashed and put up the “Beware of Dog” sign, which was tucked in the bottom of a window, behind a screened-in porch. A second sign was posted but not visible from the patio.
But the Withers either waited months to follow those orders or, in some cases, ignored them altogether. It took them 271 days to buy the required dangerous dog tag. They were repeatedly ticketed for failing to follow the rules, including keeping the dogs on leashes, but authorities never impounded the dogs. The law only lets the warden impound dogs found running loose or found not wearing valid dog tags.
Black was stunned by what she considered the authorities’ lack of concern for the threat that Apollo and Echo posed to her and her neighbors.
“I’ve lived in fear for a fricking year over a goddamn dog that has more rights to live and breathe than me,” said Black.
Black took it upon herself to warn her neighbors that the Withers’ dogs were more than menacing, as many already knew, but a physical threat to their safety. She also sued the Withers, arguing the dogs were dangerous.
Authorities had other chances to intervene. Five weeks before Echelbarger’s death, the judge overseeing the condo association’s lawsuit issued a civil order to immediately remove Apollo and Echo from the Withers’ home. The Withers did not follow the court’s instructions.
Another missed opportunity came in late September, three weeks before the attack on Echelbarger, when neighbors called police to report menacing dogs in the street. When police arrived, they said they found an intoxicated Adam Withers and his dogs.
Apollo was not muzzled or on a leash, as a court had ordered after the attack on Black.
According to police, Withers told them he had used cocaine in his garage. The officer noticed one of the dogs behaving erratically and said he believed both dogs were exposed to the drug. Police charged Adam Withers with disorderly conduct, but they did nothing about the dogs.
Ashville Police and the village officials declined to respond to criticisms.
Even on the day Echelbarger died, there was hesitation to act. When police officer Antonio Jester arrived on the scene, he found Echo, covered in Echelbarger’s blood, standing near her body.
His body camera captured this exchange:
“You want me to put the dog down?” Jester asked Acting Police Chief Daniel Mettler, who arrived at the same time.
Mettler paused. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably ought to.”
Echelbarger’s husband, stunned and distraught, pleaded with him to do it. “You got to kill it,” he said. “It attacked my wife.”
The officer asked again, and Mettler consented. Jester fired four shots. The dog yelped and ran back inside Withers’ condo before dying from its wounds. Police killed Apollo a short time later, running him over with a sheriff’s SUV and shooting him.
Roughly at the time of the attack, Adam Withers picked up his mom from work and the two went to a casino. When they got home, police had already left and they found Echo, dead inside on the hallway floor.
Both Adam and Susan Withers were charged with involuntary manslaughter and failure to confine their dogs. They pleaded not guilty.
On the witness stand in his own defense, Adam Withers told jurors he made sure to lock the front door before leaving the condo that day and he still has no idea how the dogs got out.
Ashville police testified at the trial that Withers’ front door didn’t latch. They had stuffed a towel in the hole where the deadbolt should have been.
In February, the mother and son showed no response when the judge read aloud in court the guilty verdict on all charges. Jo Ann’s family wept and hugged in the courtroom.
For the Echelbarger family, that’s too little, too late. Her adult children, Bill Rogers and Earlene Romine, place blame on a system that didn’t take the threat seriously until their mother was dead.
“I want answers. I want accountability for everyone that was reckless in this situation. And I want my mom’s death to mean something,” said Romine. “I want it to help the community so that this doesn’t happen to somebody else. This can never happen again. This is the most horrific thing that a person could go through, especially such a beautiful, wonderful person as my mom.”
For Echelbarger’s husband, Stanley, the loss is profound.
After the attack, he moved to a nursing home, ambling in on a walker. Since then, he’s lost 40 pounds and is mostly bedridden. He was unable to attend the trial.
“He lost the love of his life. He lost his caregiver. He lost his home,” Romine said. “I mean, he lost everything.”
10 years ago, lawmakers tried, and failed, to strengthen Ohio laws
Ohio’s dangerous dog laws, and the patchy enforcement system, failed to protect Echelbarger.
But the problem isn’t new.
A decade before her death, a strikingly similar case in Dayton revealed the same weaknesses and spurred a push to strengthen Ohio’s dog laws.
Klonda Richey’s neighbors’ dogs terrified her. The 57-year-old woman repeatedly complained to the Montgomery County dog warden, installed a fence around her yard in Dayton and asked for a civil protection order.
None of that protected her.
In February 2014, two mixed-Mastiff dogs savagely attacked Richey in her front yard while she took out her garbage. A passer-by found her bloodied, dead body in the snow on her front lawn. The dog owners, Andrew Nason and Julie Custer, were found guilty of failure to control dogs. The municipal court judge sentenced Nason to five months in jail and $500 in fines and Custer to three months in jail and $200 in fines.
Six years after her death, Montgomery County agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit her family brought against the county and Mark Kumpf, its former dog warden, for failing to act prior to the fatal attack.
Beagle, the former Republican state lawmaker, was among six legislators to introduce reforms. His bill would’ve increased penalties to a possible felony charge for attacks that led to serious injuries or the death of a companion animal. It also would have allowed a court to order euthanasia of a dog after one attack, shifted the burden from the victim to the owner to prove whether the dog was provoked, and increased penalties for owners who ignore notices from dog wardens.
Beagle said he wanted to provide the legal options to put down a dog after the first serious injury attack and charge the owner with a felony.
His bill went nowhere.
What happened? Opponents didn’t like the idea that the government can seize a pet and put it down. Studies have found that half of Americans consider their dogs as much a family member as their human relatives.
The bill also met resistance over whether the government should be able to send someone to prison over their dogs’ behavior, or whether the government should set standards that allow authorities to euthanize them.
Looking back, Beagle said of his bill: “It was bold. In some respects, maybe it was too bold.”
Debate over tangential issues, such as dog tethering, bogged down the bill. Dog owners, wardens, veterinarians, prosecutors and animal rights groups all weighed in and tried to shape the bill. That kind of tug-of-war can doom legislation.
Six years ago, another lawmaker who supported stronger vicious dog laws, thought a new case might spur his colleagues to action.
At age 8, Savannah Coleman was playing in a neighbor’s backyard with her friend when a pit bull named Boss clamped down on her head. Another neighbor pulled the dog off her. Savannah underwent multiple surgeries and treatments at Dayton Children’s Hospital.
The dog owners paid a $120 fine, declared bankruptcy and moved out of the neighborhood.
Dumont, Savannah’s mother, reached out to Dayton area Republican lawmaker Niraj Antani. Together, they’d try, again, to change the dangerous dog laws.
Antani picked up where Beagle left off, introducing a bill in 2019. He named it after Savannah and used photos of the injured and bandaged child in a Statehouse press conference. Antani hoped highlighting a child victim would elicit sympathy and give the bill a fighting chance.
Again, the bill went nowhere.
“A lot of these cases are with children, and they’re dying or have disfigurements or lifelong injuries. And, you know, I’m just a mom trying to protect my kid and get justice for her,” Dumont said. “I don’t understand why other people are not in support of that.”
A horror show of attacks and kills
The consequences of that failure have been severe.
In the time since the Savannah Coleman legislation failed to pass, serious dog attacks have continued: in February 2023, a pit bull in Medina ripped off Lisa Reau’s right arm. In October 2022, cyclist Eva Simons lost her left leg in an attack in Vinton County. In December 2022, Michael Palmer lost both ears, both thumbs and a finger in a dog attack in Summit County. In February 2023, Bonnie Varnes, a school bus driver in the Toledo area, got pulled down in her backyard and mauled to death by her daughter’s dog, Amina.
Children often are among the victims. Nationwide, 1 million of the 4.7 million people bitten by dogs each year require medical treatment. Kids under 10 account for nearly half of the bite victims and are overrepresented in fatalities.
In December 2024, 3-year-old Kingsley Wright died when her family dogs attacked her in Cincinnati. In July 2024, 6-year-old Jaxson Dvorak died when his uncle’s dogs attacked him in Lorain. In December 2023, 21-month-old Amya Jeffrey died after being attacked by the family dog in Cardington, a village in Morrow County. In October 2021, toddler Ka’vay Louis-Calderon died when two family dogs attacked her in Akron. In August 2020, 7-month-old Javier Benavides was killed in a dog attack in Stow. In January 2020, 4-month-old McKenzie Terwell died when her family pit bull pulled her from the living room couch where she slept with her mother.
Dayton police responding to a 911 call found McKenzie’s dad, Parker Terwell, on his front porch, crying and holding his infant daughter’s lifeless body. Her left eye was gone, her head was mangled.
She was still wearing the black polka dot onesie that said “Happy.”
Often, as in McKenzie’s case, the attacking dogs are known to the victim. They live in their home or belong to a neighbor or friend. That can complicate efforts to write and enforce laws that protect people from dangerous dogs.
It also can complicate efforts to ensure dangerous dogs don’t get an opportunity to harm anyone and, if they do, to hold owners accountable, legally and financially, for their actions.
In West Chester, Amriel Wilkinson waited six years to win an undisclosed settlement from a homeowner’s insurance company after she was attacked at age 4 in 2018 by a Rottweiler.
She was with her aunt, Kianah Towe, at the Indian Hill house owned by Karl “Tuffy” Rhodes, a former Major League Baseball player. Kianah was dating Rhodes’ son. Rhodes, who was out of town at the time, said Towe had no right to be in his home that night, or to let his dogs out of his bedroom, where he said they were penned up.
Towe let the dogs outside and started a load of laundry. That’s when the dog attacked, tossing the child around, tearing her face, nose and buttocks.
Tiara Towe, Amriel’s mom, rushed to the hospital to meet them.
“My sister jumped out and she was covered head to toe in blood. And then Amriel got pulled out on the stretcher and that’s when I saw her whole right-side jawline, I saw her teeth, her jawbone. Everything was exposed and she was covered in blood, head to toe,” Towe said. “I was not expecting it to be that severe.”
After seven hours of surgery, Amriel began the long road to recovery. She had nine surgeries over the next several years.
Her medical expenses, covered by Ohio Medicaid, are approaching $1 million.
Amriel still bears the scars today. They spread across her cheeks, nose and lips like a crooked river system. One nostril is higher than the other. The right side of her mouth is tight, and her lips uneven. Sometimes, other kids ask her what happened.
“At first, it kind of made me upset,” Amriel said. “But now I get used to it.”
Rhodes, the dog’s owner, said his Rottweiler, Kane, had no history of aggressive behavior. He said he had an adult dog sitter while he was on vacation, the dogs were on his property, and he didn’t even know Amriel was at his house.
“I feel terrible about what happened to the little girl,” he said.
Rhodes opted to euthanize Kane 10 weeks after the attack.
“Kane was my last dog,” he said.
$1 million in bills, a leg amputation and a $46,000 insurance payout
While Amriel’s case is all too common in some respects, the resolution was not. Rhodes was insured and Amriel’s family secured a settlement.
Many victims of dog attacks struggle to win even modest financial compensation via civil lawsuits. The dog owner might not be insured or have financial resources. Often the only path is to sue the landlord who carries property insurance, arguing they knew their renters had dangerous dogs.
Still, insurance policies can exempt coverage for certain breeds or cap payouts well below what a victim might rack up in medical bills.
Columbus resident Eva Simons, 66, spent two years pursuing a settlement after she lost a leg in a dog attack in 2022. She ended up getting about $46,000.
Three pit bulls attacked Simons when she stopped after getting a flat tire while biking in Vinton County, near the Moonville Tunnel.
On the walk back to her car, the dogs charged out of a house on Shea Road.
“I started yelling, hoping that someone would run out of the house and get the dogs,” she said. “No one came.”
Simons fended them off briefly but then got knocked over. The three pit bulls − a mother and her 2-year-old male pups − dragged her into a field, ravaging both of her legs.
“I made a decision while it was happening. In order to save the rest of me, I just had to let them have the leg,” Simons said.
After 20 to 25 minutes, three Good Samaritans scared off the dogs, wrapped Simons in a blanket and hoodie and then raced through 25 miles of backroads to a local hospital.
The day after the attack, Simons said, the dog owners went trick-or-treating as surgeons cut off her left leg. “That was painful to know,” she said. “While I was still fighting for my life in the hospital, they just went on with their life.”
Following the amputation of her left leg, she endured excruciating debridement of her right leg, which had become infected. After 33 days in hospitals, Simons returned to her home in Clintonville. She had to re-learn how to shower, climb stairs, do laundry and other everyday activities.
“Everything is more challenging,” she said. “Every time I attempt something new, I have to think about how I’m going to do it.”
Two years after the attack, Simons is still outraged by what she sees as injustices and a lack of accountability. While she lost her leg, the dogs’ owner faced only misdemeanor charges for failing to register and confine his three dogs. He paid $682 in fines and court costs.
Simons estimates her medical bills, mostly covered by insurance, approached $1 million.
Simons sued the landlord who rented the house to the dog owners. The insurance policy capped liability coverage at $100,000 and after lawyers’ fees and paybacks to medical insurance companies, she netted $46,073.85.
“This is the only compensation I have received for the loss of my left leg, injuries to my right leg, pain and suffering, and most of all, living the rest of my life as an amputee, possibly facing complications and revision surgeries,” she said.
The insurance check and the dog owner’s fines are not enough for Simons.
“What bothers me is that there was no responsibility or accountability, other than the small fine they paid,” Simons said. “There was nothing stopping them from getting another pack of dogs and doing the same thing.”
Drew Russell understands that kind of frustration. Two pit bulls attacked her 11-year-old daughter, Avery, in June while she was playing with a friend at a home in Reynoldsburg. The dogs ripped off both her ears, gouged her cheek, forehead and abdomen.
When she got the call telling her to go directly to the pediatric hospital, Russell wasn’t thinking about Ohio’s dog laws or whether her fellow Ohioans take seriously the threat posed by dangerous dogs. She only was thinking about her daughter.
Her aunt told Russell to take photos of Avery’s injuries. Russell thought that was crazy. But she handed her cellphone to a nurse, who took the pictures.
“I’m glad I have them,” she said months later.
In the months after the attack, as her daughter endures a slow recovery, Russell decided to share the photos. She wants others to see what happens when a vicious dog attacks.
She hopes those photos inspire, and her daughter’s story, changes that will prevent other kids from suffering the same fate.
Russell hired Columbus attorney Bill Patmon III, whose father served in the Ohio House and carried the bill to make animal cruelty a felony.
They plan to lobby state lawmakers to reform dangerous dog laws. They’re talking about some of the same changes Beagle and Antani tried to achieve years ago. They want felony charges for dog owners in certain vicious attacks and euthanasia for dogs after the first serious injury or fatality. And they’re kicking around ways to require more robust insurance coverage and categorizing dogs over 25 pounds as potentially dangerous.
Russell wants to work with other families who have gone through the same trauma and loss.
“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?” she said. “Because it’s just going to keep happening.”
Akron Beacon Journal reporter Stephanie Warsmith and Columbus Dispatch reporter Max Filby contributed to this report.
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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