Child bitten by dog fears going outside

June 19, 2010 at 12:04a.m.

By jeanne starmack

campbell

A child who was attacked by a Great Dane was expected to be home from the hospital by today, and the dog’s owner says she’s sorry the boy was hurt.

The boy’s mother, Shaunta Dorsey, said her son Marcus, 7, was taken to Akron Children’s Hospital in Akron so that he could have a broken ankle pinned after the attack on Blackburn Street on Wednesday afternoon.

She said Marcus also had a chipped elbow bone and bites and scratches along his body and on his arm and face.

“He’s coming around,” Dorsey said Friday from the hospital, adding that her son was expected to be released sometime during the day.

“He’s traumatized, saying he’ll never be around dogs, and he’s afraid to go outside,” she continued.

Police reported that the dog did not have a current license, but was current on its rabies vaccination.

The owner of the dog, Cordie Paige, said the 5-year-old male Great Dane had belonged to her son, Elijah Paige. He was the driver of the car that crashed into a house on Cynthia Drive in April. The crash killed Paige and two of three friends who were with him.

“It’s been a rough couple of months,” Cordie Paige said, adding that the shock of her son’s death caused a heart attack in her mother, who died as well.

“I’m really sorry,” she said about Marcus. Right now, the dog is confined to the garage. Paige will probably have it euthanized, she said.

“He probably wants to be with Elijah, anyway,” she said, adding that she’d never known the dog to be vicious before.

Police reported that Akron Children’s Hospital called them after Marcus was brought to the hospital’s Boardman campus. They went to investigate and learned that Paige’s grandson had seen three boys throwing crab apples at the dog.

Police said they found crab apples there.

“The children were throwing crab apples at the dog, and it aggravated the dog,” Paige said Friday, adding that she wasn’t sure if the dog broke loose or if Marcus just got within its reach. No one at her house saw the attack.

The boys had been playing in another neighbor’s yard before the attack, Dorsey said.

She said Marcus told her the other boys were throwing crab apples, but he was not. She was told the dog broke loose, and the boys scattered once it did, but it caught Marcus. At some point, it stopped the attack and ran away, she said her son told her.

She was grabbing her purse and getting ready to take Marcus and his 9-year-old sister for ice cream, she said, but when she got to the door she heard crying.

Marcus was there, accompanied by his friends and one of their fathers.

“Then he just fell inside the door,” she said.