Man helps save boy from attack by 2 Rottweilers

Police told the man that the boy would have been killed without his help.
TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL
HAMILTON, Ontario -- Together with his young son and his girlfriend, Mark Berka was just pulling into his driveway late Christmas afternoon when he heard the screams and cries for help.
Steps away, two collarless Rottweiler dogs were tugging at a small boy, while the child's terrified guardian, a young woman in her 20s, struggled to wrest him free.
"It was a tug of war," recounted Berka, who still does not know the name of the 2-year-old Canadian-Chinese boy, new to the neighborhood, whom he saved from near-certain death. "Those dogs just wanted this little boy. I've never seen anything like it," he said.
Across the street, 16-year-old Laura Miller was sitting down to Christmas dinner with her family when she, too, saw the drama unfold.
The boy "looked like he was a doll being torn apart," Miller said. "One dog had him by the hand or arm, the other had him by the leg."
To the rescue
On seeing the attack, Berka, a burly 41-year-old who works for a local hydraulics company, sprinted to the schoolyard and began hitting and kicking the two Rottweilers with all his might. One of them soon abandoned its attack on the child.
But the other did not, and for at least five minutes Berka and the boy's companion were locked in combat with the dog.
"It was relentless," he said of his adversary. "At one point, the dog ripped the boy out of my arms and started shaking him."
Laura's mother, Alicia English, was watching in horror. She said the child's head hit the pavement more times than she could count. "The dog had him in his mouth and was shaking him against the walkway, over and over. I don't know how he was still conscious."
Wounds
Finally, Berka tore the child free again and hustled him into the arms of his guardian, who ran him across to English's house, where towels were brought to stanch the boy's wounds.
The child was bleeding copiously. His pants had been ripped off, exposing deep bites to his legs, belly and buttocks. Part of one cheek was hanging open, and an ear was partly ripped off.
Police trapped the Rottweilers in the schoolyard, where animal-control officers captured them with lasso-like nooses. The boy's mother also arrived, too hysterical to speak. Then his father appeared, accompanying his son in the ambulance that whisked them to Hamilton's McMaster Children's Hospital. The boy is expected to be badly scarred.
Berka shrugged off his act of heroism, insisting that most other people would have acted similarly. He modestly concedes that had he not plunged into battle -- emerging without a single bite -- "the police told me the little boy would have been killed."
Remaining anonymous
Yet just who that little boy is remains much of a mystery. Authorities would not release the family's name, citing privacy considerations, and few residents seemed to know anything about them.
The owners of the Rottweilers, too, remain anonymous, although they are known to local authorities because the dogs had escaped their backyard pen at least twice before, said Jim Gillis, who heads municipal law enforcement in Hamilton. They thought the dogs were still in the back yard the next morning, when they were contacted by officers who considered them "responsible owners" who had provided for the 16-month-old litter mates adequately. They were distraught and surrendered the dogs immediately.
That means after 10 days of scrutiny for rabies at the city's animal control shelter, where both were confined, the Rottweilers will be euthanized, but the Criminal Code does not provide charges to the owners, said Gillis.