Three dogs, five puppies slaughtered over…unpaid parking tickets:

A lawsuit will proceed in U.S. District Court on November 6 over a May 8, 2003 incident where Pennsylvania Constables Richard Seeds, 41, Greg Balliet and Vincent Stahl fired eleven shots killing two dogs and five puppies while serving an arrest warrant for unpaid parking tickets in an Allentown home. The officials were after Jeremiah Hartman who had been accused of not paying thirty-two parking tickets that accumulated on a vehicle that had broken down while Hartman did not have the money to pay for repairs.

The constables knocked on the door of a friend’s home at 312 South Franklin Street where Hartman was at the time. Suzanne Klein answered. The constables asked her whether she had dogs and whether she would secure them. She said she would. Without warning, Seeds entered through a back door. The first dog to run down the stairs to investigate, a boxer named Wizard, crumpled to the ground after being shot once. Seeds then proceeded to shoot the wounded animal a second time in the head, according to the family’s account given to the Allentown City Council.

Two other dogs then ran upstairs and were fired upon by Balliet in the kitchen. Topanga, a pregnant pit bull, was wounded by two bullets and lost five puppies. The owner was left with $2000 in veterinary bills. The third dog was killed. Three adults and three infants were in the home at the time, all within ten feet of the shooting.

In October, Judge James Knoll Gardner allowed the prosecution to let the jury know that just before the incident, Seeds told his colleagues, “I have to get something to eat or I am going to shoot somebody.”

Meanwhile, the Eighth Circuit has struck a minor blow for dogowners, in reversing a lower court’s grant of summary judgment on qualified immunity claims to a police officer who recklessly shot and killed a family pet he mistook for a stray. Click “more” for the sad facts of this one.

(Hat tip.)

-2-
At approximately 8:00 a.m. on
February 28, 2002, West Branch City Administrator Ty Doermann received a call
from a West Branch resident, who complained about a large black dog that was
running loose through her neighborhood and had been bothering her dog. Doermann
conveyed the complaint to West Branch Police Chief, Dan Knight. Knight responded
to the call, and drove around the neighborhood in his squad car in an attempt to catch
the loose dog. Knight spotted, then lost sight of, the loose dog several times
throughout his pursuit. Finally, Knight parked his car in the driveway of 417 North
Maple Street, the Andrewses’ home, because he had seen a large black dog in the
backyard at that address. He walked toward the fenced backyard with a dog leash in
his pocket and fired two shots at the dog; immediately, he realized he had shot the
wrong dog. Jana Andrews, the owner of the dog, was standing on her back patio just
a few feet away from her dog, Riker, when he was shot. She had just let Riker out to
go to the bathroom inside the Andrewses’ enclosed, fenced-in backyard. Riker had
been badly wounded by Knight’s first two shots, so Knight decided to shoot Riker a
third time to end Riker’s suffering.

[...]

Prior to shooting Riker, Knight gave no warning, and made no effort to inquire
if Riker had been running loose prior to the shooting, or whether the Andrewses’
backyard was completely enclosed by a fence, which it was.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 at 10:59 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.