Child mauled by dogs in Jefferson City; one dog shot and killed by police
Mitchell Kaminski
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KMIZ)
A small child was attacked by two dogs Thursday night in Jefferson City, according to police.
The Jefferson City Police Department said dispatchers received multiple 911 calls around 7:43 p.m. reporting a pit bull actively attacking a child in the 1000 block of Jackson Street. Officers said the dog was still attacking the child as emergency crews responded to the scene.
When officers arrived, they found the child and the child’s mother, but said the aggressive dogs prevented them from providing aid. The animals then ran toward a nearby park. Due to the park’s proximity to a heavily populated area, officers shot and killed one of the dogs at the scene, the department said in a news release.
The child was taken to a hospital in Columbia for treatment of injuries sustained in the attack.
Dominique Harrison said he was sitting on his porch when he heard someone yelling for help. When he walked down the street, he said the mother of the child told him her son had gotten dragged into her backyard by a pair of dogs.
Harrison went into the backyard and saw the two dogs mauling a young boy underneath a trampoline.
“I just saw the back of his head, he had he have a lot of hair. So it was a couple of pieces of his hair was missing and it was just a lot of blood .So, I really couldn’t see the wounds,” Harrison told ABC 17 News.
Harrison said he went into “protector mode.”
“Somebody had to do something. So I took it into my, my hands to try to do the best that I could,” he said.
Harrison said one of the dogs began charging toward him. As he began to back away, he stepped over several tree stumps and items scattered across the yard. A woman — who was standing nearby — gave him her cane, which he used to defend himself. After hitting the dogs with a cane, he grabbed the child and ran inside the back door of the child’s home.
“They have a lot of trees. And so he grabbed the baby and ran inside the owner’s home because their back door was open,” Harrison’s wife, Kennysah Lamara Harrison said. “As soon as he got in there, he saw another dog, so at this moment it’s like, ‘What did I just come in to?’ But the homeowner was able to grab that dog and put that dog in the basement.”
Kennysha Lamara Harrison added that one of the dogs was shot by police in front of Lincoln University.
“I was at home and so he actually called and just was like yelling, ‘Get down here, get down here.’ And so when I went down there, I didn’t know what was going on at first. And so to see him no shoes on, hole in his sock, blood all over his body, I was panicking because I thought if something happens to one of my kids,” Kennysha Harrison said. “The baby was actually still here on the ground when we heard several gunshots. So, you know, we look back just like, ‘Oh, my God, what’s going on in the neighborhood today?’ My son was actually on his way home, and we thought that one of the dogs was still on the loose. So my husband told me to go pick him up so he wasn’t walking. As we were driving back home, that’s when we saw the scene where the dog was shot.”
A police report obtained by ABC 17 News states that the child is 4 years old. Police records indicate that one of the dogs began running down Roland Street at 7:46 p.m., and by 7:48 p.m., the other dog had returned to its home. Officers first fired shots at 7:49 p.m., but the fleeing pit bull continued to run before it was eventually killed at 7:51 p.m. near Lafayette and Dunklin Street.
“I feel like they handled the situation as needed,” Dominique Harrison said.