FORT WORTH — Twenty-four hours after a Fort Worth police officer fatally shot Lily, a 5-year-old border collie-English setter mix, its owners still don’t understand why the police officer was on their property and why he used lethal force.
Mark and Cindy Boling had just returned from a shopping trip, and their two dogs leaped into their truck then dashed inside the garage before re-emerging, barking, when an officer walked up the driveway in the 4700 block of Norma Street in east Fort Worth’s Meadowbrook neighborhood.
The officer asked him to control his dogs, Mark Boling said. He urged the officer not to advance, but he did.
“I asked him to stay where he was,” Boling, 52, an electronics technician with a defense contractor, recalled saying. Then he told the officer: “My dogs don’t bite, They’re not going to hurt you. They’re just going to run up to you.”
In a drama that unfolded in seconds, the officer walked onto the Boling’s elevated porch, then stepped onto a painted brick pillar several feet higher, Boling said.
Police spokesman Sgt. Pedro Criado said in a statement Monday that the officer waited by the driveway when two barking dogs charged him aggressively while he repeatedly asked a man at the house to call the animals back. Then the officer jumped onto the porch pillar.
“As the dogs were getting closer to attack/bite the officer, the officer fired his service weapon, striking the dog closest to him,” Criado wrote. Criado did not identify the officer.
Here, the couple’s account diverges from the police statement.
Boling said he had gained control of one of the dogs by the time the officer raised his gun. “Then I hear my wife yelling, ‘Don’t shoot my baby, please don’t hurt my baby!’”
The officer fired once, striking the dog in the back. It dashed to the back yard, where it bled to death within three minutes.
Cindy Boling said she shouted, “Did you shoot my dog?”
“You’d better check on your dog,” she quoted the officer as responding.
But the officer still had the gun raised and pointed toward her husband and surviving dog, she said.
“Why are you on my property? I didn’t call you,” Mark Boling recalls asking.
“Copper theft,” he said the officer replied.
According to Criado, the reported theft had occurred two blocks up the street, near 4900 Norma.
More officers arrived in nine police cars and marked off the area with yellow tape. A sergeant handed Mark Boling a card with a number for the department’s risk management office, in case he wanted to inquire about restitution for the dog they had adopted from the Humane Society.
They were told not to expect an official police response for at least a week.
Criado wrote that anytime an officer shoots a firearm, that triggers a review by “high ranking officials.”
As his wife cried Monday, Mark Boling asked, “Why didn’t he Mace my dog? Why did he do some something so ... so final? Why didn’t he move off my property?”
http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/05/28/3991473/owners-of-dog-killed-by-officer.html