Did he keep them around small children or loose around people in general?
They were completely unsupervised. The family moved and left the dogs at their old house. This and that the story comes from detroit is what people should really be focusing on. This is not a surprise. The people who owned these dogs didn't know what the hell they were doing. They likely bought the dogs from someone selling cheap fight bred pitbulls, then neglected them most of their life, failed to train them to do anything, and then wonder why the dogs would attack someone. I don't feel the least bit sorry for this family. Maybe that is cold hearted, but oh well. I similarly do not feel sorry for people who fail to teach their kids how to properly use the guns in their house and fail to lock them up and then their kid blows their own brains out. Ignorance and stupidity should not get sympathy nor pity. If a heroin addict dies of an overdose we don't say "oh how tragic" - we say yeah it was bound to happen - just as an attack was bound to happen in the hands of these owners. It wouldn't have mattered what type of large breed dog these people owned - it was going to end similar.