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Vienna man charged with a misdemeanor offense for purportedly shooting neighbor’s dog
By Ed Runyan
VIENNA
A man who is pastor of a Niles church is charged in Girard Municipal Court with misdemeanor injuring animals after purportedly causing fatal injuries by shooting his neighbor’s dog Saturday afternoon.
David W. Murphy, 61, of Niles Vienna Road, was charged Monday. He will be arraigned Nov. 17. He declined to be interviewed by The Vindicator on Monday afternoon, saying he “just got off the phone with my lawyer, and he told me not to say anything.”
Murphy told police he fired at the dogs because they were near his chicken coop, acting aggressively, especially the black Labrador retriever, according to a Vienna police report.
Kimberly Ellis, owner of the Labrador, named Tucker, told police she was working in back of her home on Warren-Sharon Road when she realized the dog, 15 months old, had disappeared. “It’s not like him not to be with me,” she said Monday at her home.
Tucker apparently had met up with Ellis’ parents’ dog a short distance directly in back of the Ellis home, because her parents’ dog’s leash was empty, Ellis said.
She searched about 30 minutes on a four-wheeler through rural areas behind her house and their 80 acres of land before hearing three gunshots, each accompanied by an animal “yelp,” and then a fourth shot.
She headed in the direction of the gunshots and stopped to ask a woman at the Murphy residence, whom she did not know, if she had seen two dogs, and the woman said she had not.
After 30 more minutes of searching, Ellis went back toward the Murphy residence and eventually talked to someone who had seen her dog nearby, and she found Tucker barely moving, she said. She later learned the dog had three gunshot wounds, one of which severed his spine.
She took the dog to a veterinarian in Akron and learned that nothing could be done to save him, and it was euthanized.
“Tucker is my No. 1,” Ellis said. “He sleeps with me. I can’t even go to the bathroom without him whining at the door.”
“I was emptying a wagon. In less than 10 minutes, they [her dogs] were all there except Tucker,” she said. None of her dogs is leashed, she said.
While searching, she met a neighbor near the Murphy residence who told her Murphy had shot his dog at some earlier point also, but his dog lived, and the dog’s owner said he paid the veterinary bill himself.
When Ellis returned to Vienna several hours later with her dog’s body in her car, she stopped at the Murphy residence again to ask if the people there knew what had happened.
Murphy admitted shooting near the dogs but not at them, Ellis said. “He says, ‘One time while I was away, I was told a German shepherd came and wiped my whole chicken coop out,’” Ellis said. “I said, ‘You shot a black lab.’”
Ohio law provides an “affirmative defense” for someone who kills an animal attacking livestock, but “I’m not sure if it fits” in this case, Vienna Police Chief Bob Ludt said Monday. “We believe we have enough probable cause” to file the charge, he said.
A call to Apostolic Bible Church of Niles at 1623 West Park Ave. in Weathersfield Township was not answered Monday. Various directories list the pastor there as David W. Murphy, and a David W. Murphy with the same birth date and address as the man charged in Saturday’s incident filed a police report at the church in 2005.
The Ohio injuring-animals law says no person “shall maliciously, or willfully, and without the consent of the owner, kill or injure a horse, mare, foal, filly, jack, mule, sheep, goat, cow, steer, bull, heifer, ass, ox, swine, dog, cat, or other domestic animal that is the property of another.”