Posted on 01/09/2012 11:39:35 AM PST by Altariel
Some residents at Danville Park Apartments are outraged over police firing at two dogs on the walkway outside their front doors.
The residents said the shooting killed one animal, injured another and put the tenants in danger of gunfire that left bullet holes in doors, walls and a wooden deck around 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day.
Witness accounts of the shootings contradict the reports of officers and a supervising sergeant.
The shootings by officers Demetrius Hightower and Jarrod Birchfield are being reviewed by Decatur Police’s office of professional standards, police spokesman Lt. John Crouch said.
Danville Park resident Steven Shaddrix said police put others in danger.
“This close encounter over a dog?” he said. “I’m surprised somebody didn’t get shot. It (a bullet) could have easily gone down through the deck and through somebody’s window downstairs.”
One bullet passed through the front door of a neighbor’s apartment and struck a piece of furniture. The apartment was occupied at the time.
The officers’ reports said they opened an already cracked door to the apartment of John Haggamaker, whom they were seeking in relation to an altercation, when they encountered and killed Kevin Haggamaker’s 3-year-old boxer Ace.
Ace was inside John Haggamaker’s apartment with John’s beagle mix, Roscoe, also injured in the shooting, and his beagle, Remy.
The officers said when they pushed open the door, a growling dog came at them. They reported that they backed away as far as the landing of the stairway, and the dog charged.
“When that happened, Officer Hightower fired his Taser at the dog,” Crouch said. “That stopped the dog, but otherwise didn’t have any effect.
“The dog came at them again, and that was when Officer Birchfield fired (his gun). When Officer Birchfield fired, the dog ran back into the apartment.”
But the dog charged again, the officers said.
Next-door neighbor Hailey Brown said she went outside when she heard the commotion, saw police open the door and saw the dog come to the doorway.
“They started Taser-ing it as they backed up,” she said. “You could hear the dog whimpering. It wasn’t even being aggressive at that point. It was just hurt.”
Brown said she asked the officers to let her take the dog into her own apartment, but they refused and opened fire with their handguns.
‘Did nothing wrong’
“It was wrong. The animal did nothing wrong,” Brown said. “It (Ace) was a big baby. It was always sweet. It just looked big and intimidating.”
Witnesses also said they didn’t believe the door was partially open because they heard police knocking loudly and repeatedly before opening it. Kevin Haggamaker said the dogs would have escaped if the door had been cracked.
“Nobody was in the apartment,” he said. “They opened the door and let the dogs out.”
Police arrested Kevin Haggamaker on charges of public intoxication, open container and tampering with physical evidence. John Haggamaker was taken in on charges of public intoxication and resisting arrest.
Kevin Haggamaker described the CKC-registered dog as an “80-pound baby.” He said he didn’t see the shooting because his back was turned as the officer escorted him to the car.
“On the way to the cop car, I asked the officer that arrested me, ‘Don’t let them shoot my dog, please!,” Kevin Haggamaker said. “He’s just a big baby. He won’t hurt anybody.’
“He didn’t say anything. And then I heard gunshots.”
John Haggamaker said he was in the next apartment talking with Shaddrix when he heard gunshots.
“When I came out, I saw Ace,” John Haggamaker said. “I knew they had Taser-ed him. He had two wires going to him. He was clutched in a sitting position, had one paw in the air and was making a little howling sound like a dog in pain. ... Ace was like five or six feet from the cops.”
Crouch said the arrest report states that John Haggamaker “confronted the officers, was loud, yelling obscenities and was extremely intoxicated.”
Witnesses, however, said John Haggamaker promptly obeyed the officer’s command to “get down.”
Crouch said that according to the report, the dog charged the officers a final time as Hightower was about to handcuff John Haggamaker.
That’s when both officers fired, killing the dog, Crouch said.
John Haggamaker said he heard more gunshots and saw Ace fall.
Kevin Haggermaker said that after he got out of jail, he collected Ace’s body from Decatur Animal Services. Ace appeared to have been shot between the eyes and in the right rear leg. A large chunk of flesh also was missing from his left rear leg, he said.
He had Ace cremated and keeps his remains on his nightstand.
At least one bullet struck Roscoe, the beagle mix, in his left front paw, though police said that was not intentional. Roscoe ran to the patrol car and leapt inside when Kitchens opened the door to put Kevin Haggamaker in the car. Police took him to a vet’s office for treatment.
Toes shot off
John Haggermaker said Roscoe, whose left leg remained bandaged, apparently lost all but the two middle toes on that paw.
Shaddrix said he thinks the Haggamakers’ were out of line when they got into a fight with people attending a New Year’s Eve party, but that police also crossed a line.
“Especially a beagle,” he said. “A little beagle puppy comes out and they’re going to shoot it, too?”
The officers are going to be "cleared" after a make-believe "investigation."
My experience as well. If the trend keeps up there will be open warfare between police and "Civilians"
BTW, when the the police stop being civilians?
Sadly, that’s probably true.
Oh, it's going to stop one of these days when one of these morons shoots someone's dog and gets blown away for it.
“What is it about steroids that makes cops hate dogs so much.”
It’s not hate. Cops these days are taught early on that their top priority is going home at the end of their shift, no matter who or what they have to kill to do it. It used to be that cops were tough guys who didn’t mind a physical confrontation. Now they are hyper careful about their safety, unwilling to even get a scratch on them. They just want to work their 20 years and collect their fat pensions. I think their training also changed when women began to contaminate the force. Where men were expected to take risks and physically overpower men, dogs etc, adding women meant the training had to change. Self protection became the key because women would get killed in physical confrontations. Its easier and less discriminating to just teach everyone to shoot or tazer whatever is threatening.
There are a lot of people in law enforcement who would have been considered way too wimpy cowardly for the job even thirty years ago. [fixed!]
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