Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Dog owner defends pets

When Kari awoke, the cardboard box was on the lawn, nudged beneath a yellow metal sprinkler on her grassy front yard.

It had been a long night, almost sleepless, since learning on the news that her Rottweilers had bitten a 12-year-old boy Monday evening when she was gone. The boy had climbed into her yard chasing a ball and was carried out by police officers minutes later, his left arm and right leg bloodied.

Kari and her husband spent the night debating putting the dogs to sleep. They have a daughter, and can understand a parent's concerns, she said.

Yet the dogs were in their yard at the time -- guarding the family home, not roaming the streets, and they should be allowed to live, the couple resolved.

So when she pulled back the flaps of the cardboard box Tuesday morning, Kari was sickened: "Get rid of the dogs or they'll be dead," the note read. She took it inside, along with her dogs, and says she's had a knot in her stomach ever since.

The threat frightened her into withholding her full name and those of her dogs. "I've got a 1 1/2-year-old daughter, and she's got to live through this, too," the woman said, holding the toddler on her hip.

The oldest dog, a 2 1/2-year-old female that Kari got as a pup for her birthday, licks your hand when you reach out to pet her. She let a reporter enter her home, stroke her head, pat her back, shake her paw. She jumped up once, her 85-pound body planting thick paws before flopping to the floor at her master's command.

The other two -- a 1-year-old female who is for Kari's daughter, and the dog's 2-year-old father, who belongs to Kari's husband -- lie on the floor a few feet away.

All three have been quarantined to the house in the 4200 block of Hayes Place for the next nine days by the city's animal control division.

Meanwhile, 12-year-old Marcus Rodgers was expected to come home from University Medical Center today.

Numerous stitches are in place to help heal the 3-inch-long gashes on his left arm, from his shoulder to his elbow. More are scattered from his right knee to his ankle.

"Had he not been wearing jeans, it would have been worse," said Michelle Reeves, Marcus' aunt. "And the dogs ripped his T-shirt right off him."

The wounds did not injure any tendons, ligaments or nerves, Reeves said.

Marcus lives with his aunt at the home directly south of Kari's. A seven-foot cinder block wall permanently marks the property line.

The wall was put in last summer because Reeves was "afraid the dogs would break down the wooden fence" that previously enclosed her back yard in the 4200 block of Garden Place.

Reeves planned to meet with her lawyer today about how to handle the canine situation. She mentioned after the attack about 5 p.m. Monday that a civil lawsuit to try to have the dogs put to sleep was among the possibilities.

Kari said the animal control officer assigned to the case received proof her dogs have been vaccinated for rabies and have valid tags. And she said the officer has spoken to the dogs' veterinarian.

But as for Reeves: "We haven't talked to her," Kari said. "And I don't think she wants to talk to us. She's never liked our dogs anyway."

Kari said she'd spoken to Marcus and his friends several times, requesting they stop putting their hands through her fence to pet the dogs. Signs posted along her front fence warn to "Beware of Dogs."

"And I've told them before, if their balls go into our yard, I'll get them out," she said. "If the dogs rip up the balls, I'll buy the kids new ones. ... I just don't want them going in there and suddenly surprising the dogs. My husband has caught them climbing on our shed in the back. But I guess they're just boys being boys."

Each month, when the gas man goes into her back yard to read the meter, "he whistles to the dogs, and they don't mind him walking in," Kari said. "I wouldn't let people near my yard if there was a threat they could get hurt. My dogs aren't vicious."

It was her father, Kari said, who got her interested in Rottweilers. "He loved Rottweilers and Siberian huskies, so I grew up learning about them. I worked in a pet store when I was younger and learned about a lot of different dogs, but I've always liked Rottweilers."

And the three dogs are a relief at night when she's been alone, she said. "But their size means nothing to me, nor what people say about Rottweilers. They say they're mean, they're killers. It's not true. That's ignorance. It's how you raise a dog that makes them aggressive. People do it, not the dogs."

Marcus petted the dogs before he climbed into the yard Monday, Reeves said. "But the minute he hit the ground, the large dog attacked him. He shook him like dogs do with rags. Then the other two dogs joined in."

Marcus was fending off the dogs with a stick when police arrived.

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