Warren cops kill 3 dogs that attacked 10-year-old

Photo

CLEANUP JOB: John Onatz, animal control officer with the Warren Police Department, hauls the remains of one of the three dogs shot by city police on Merriweather Street Northwest into his pickup truck. The dogs attacked a boy waiting for his school bus Tuesday morning.

By Ed Runyan

A police report said the boy’s injuries were severe but didn’t identify him.

WARREN — The city’s animal control officer went to Merriweather Street Northwest looking for two dogs that bit a newspaper carrier but couldn’t find them.

He returned to Merriweather after a second attack Tuesday, apparently by the same dogs, severely injured a 10-year-old boy waiting for his school bus.

Two patrolmen had already shot two of the three dogs when John Onatz, the police department’s animal control officer, returned to Merriweather, said acting Warren police Chief Tim Bowers.

Onatz stood by as Patrolman Reuben Shaw killed the third dog with a 12-gauge shotgun in the backyard of a house a block or so away from where the two attacks occurred.

A Warren police report says the 10-year-old boy was bitten on the head, both legs and left hand by three dogs around 8:15 a.m. Police didn’t identify the boy in a police report or say what hospital he went to — but described the boy’s injuries as “severe wounds.”

No one has claimed ownership of the three dogs, Bowers said. None of the dogs was wearing a dog tag.

Merriweather Street is in a residential neighborhood behind the Austin Village Plaza.

The attack on the 10-year-old occurred about three hours after a 21-year-old Warren man delivering newspapers was bitten on the back of his legs about 5 a.m. in front of 2846 Merriweather, apparently by two of the three dogs that later attacked the boy, police said.

Shaw said he believed that the dogs they spotted were the ones who attacked the boy because of descriptions provided by the boy’s family.

Shaw said he killed the largest of the three dogs, a bull mastiff weighing more than 100 pounds, first. All of the dogs were being taken to a local veterinarian so they could be tested for rabies.

“It took two officers to lift it,” Onatz said of the bull mastiff.

A second dog weighing around 70 pounds appeared to be part pit bull terrier, and the third was a mixed breed, Onatz said.

Police said the newspaper carrier was delivering to 2846 Merriweather at 4:45 a.m. when he heard footsteps and then saw a large, black-and-white pit bull terrier and a smaller brindle-colored pit bull “lunge from behind him.”

The dogs bit him several times on the back of both legs, leaving him with minor injuries. His mother took him to Forum Health Trumbull Memorial Hospital, but the hospital would not release any information on him.

Onatz said the larger dog that the carrier described as a pit bull was more likely the bull mastiff. The other dog is apparently part pit bull, he said. Onatz said he thinks the two dogs that attacked the newspaper carrier were among the three that attacked the boy.

“When they hurt a child, that’s when I’ve got to do something,” Shaw said of the decision to kill the animals.

Another officer, Terrence Eddington, who lives in the neighborhood, said several dogs chased his son as he was walking nearby Monday evening, and he saw the three dogs roaming the neighborhood earlier Tuesday on his way to work.

“I hate to see any dog killed, personally, but there’s times when it has to be put down,” Bowers said, adding that he is reviewing the incident to determine whether officers acted properly in killing the animals.

runyan@vindy.com