Cedar Hill pit bulls give rise to residents’ fears

by Loyd Brumfield of of Cedar Hill TODAY

Amy Stamper was standing on her porch, watching her son play two doors down. She turned to put her dog up, then heard screams coming from down the street.

Her 5-year-old son, Logan, had just called a friend out to play before a pit bull came through an unlocked gate and attacked him.

“I heard him scream. Thankfully the dog was on a chain or it could have been much worse,” said Stamper, who lives close to Cedar Hill High School. “But still, I saw my son, and half his face was gone.”

Logan was taken to Children's Hospital in Dallas with a large chunk of his cheek missing and an ugly gash under his right eye.

Stamper ran to her son but had no idea what had happened.

“I just started yelling, ‘What happened? What happened?'” she said, but Logan was too traumatized to speak.

Logan's friend, whose parents own the dog, then said: “My dog got him.”

Though the dog was on a chain at the time, it wasn't short enough to confine it to a safe area in the backyard, which it shared with several other pit bulls.

In addition, Stamper and other neighbors had complained before about the dog running loose.

Stamper's story is similar to others told during a citizens forum at the May 22 city council meeting.

Dean Graham of The Meadows neighborhood in High Pointe, spoke for several neighbors who went to the meeting and said they are terrified of going outdoors.

“I don't go anywhere without a knife,” Graham told the council. “I've seen some people take clubs with them. Some don't take walks anymore. Some don't let their children play outside anymore.”

Graham and others told stories of dogs tearing down fences to get to people or other animals and having shotguns with them when they mow their lawns.

They said they want the city to significantly increase fines for owners who let their dogs run free and to hit owners harder when their dogs are involved in attacks.

“What it really comes down to is we are living in fear in High Pointe Phase I and II,” another resident said, adding she has seen her dog “torn to shreds before my eyes” and seen her neighbors' dogs suffer the same fate.

Mayor Rob Franke was sympathetic to their concerns and said the city will strengthen its animal ordinance as soon as the state legislature loosens up some of its laws.

“Back in the 1980s a city somewhere banned certain breeds of dangerous dogs, meaning pit bulls, and the State Supreme Court even upheld the ban, but then the Legislature came back and added specific language to a statute forbidding that,” Franke said.

Under current law, cities don't have the authority to ban dangerous breeds, Franke said. The Texas Municipal League, of which Cedar Hill is a member, is lobbying the state to overturn the law, “but it hasn't happened yet,” Franke said.

Residents complained that the law offers them no recourse and even allows dogs to go back to their owners after they have attacked someone.

Animal Control officer Jeremy Randolph says he encounters roaming pit bulls nearly every day on the job.

“There's maybe one day a week I don't get a call about a pit bull,” he said.

Most of the calls are from residents who see the dogs running free in their neighborhoods and aren't the result of an attack, he said.

“Most of the times, they are friendly (when he picks them up),” he said.

Randolph has been bitten seriously only once in his five years on the job in Cedar Hill, and that was by a rottweiler.

“We get a lot of calls about dogs chasing kids and we get there and don't see any kids,” he said. “I don't know if that means the report is false or not, but we definitely find the dogs.”

Stamper talked to the dog's owner not long after the attack, who said she would be willing to help with medical bills. But soon thereafter, she stopped answering her door.

At a municipal court date, the dog was returned to the owner rather than confiscated or declared dangerous, which carries a mandatory sentence of euthanasia.

Logan and his friends were interviewed during the court session, and his friends testified that they had warned him to stay away from the dog, Stamper said.

Randolph will generally take care of the loose pit bulls himself if there are fewer than two. More than that and he'll call for backup, usually from a police officer when he and partner Ty Yount are working separate hours.

The best protection if you encounter a pit bull or any dangerous dog is to carry something long that can reach the dog before it reaches you, Randolph said.

“I do a PowerPoint presentation slide show on protection, and I tell people one of the best things you can take with you is an umbrella,” he said. “When I open my umbrella, the dog always goes for that first and not me.”

Sticks, poles and baseball bats can do the job, too.

The vast majority of stray dogs he and Yount encounter are pit bulls, Randolph said.

“The pit bull is the dog of the century,” he said.

He can usually tell by looking at them if they are dogs raised by loving owners.

“If he has scars or scratches or if his ears are clipped, I'm pretty sure the owner isn't going to claim it (once it winds up at the Tri-City Animal Shelter),” he said.

Tri-City takes in an alarming number of pit bulls and the vast majority are euthanized because the shelter doesn't allow them to be put up for adoption, shelter Director Alissa Prelis said.

She, Randolph and some of the residents who spoke at the meeting emphasized that pit bulls are not born to attack and only get that way because they are bred into it by irresponsible owners.

The jaw strength in a pit bull is more powerful than any other kind of dog breed, and that contributes to their ability to kill another dog or human being, Prelis said.

“This is not to put down pit bulls, but a lot of owners aren't responsible,” said the resident who saw her dog killed. “They breed them to fight and then let them run free. A lot of these dogs live in cruelty and you can't blame them. You have to blame the owners.”

Logan is doing better, Stamper said, recovering from multiple surgeries. Some internal stitches still give him trouble from time to time, but otherwise he is improving.

Emotionally, the child is recovering, too.

“At first he cried a lot and didn't sleep much, but he is getting better,” Stamper said. “Every day he wants to know when it will be all better, but I think he understands that it will be one day.”

Her son missed a week of kindergarten in the wake of the attack.

“He was kind of hesitant to go back, but he was all right once he got used to it again,” Stamper said.

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