It’s another day ending in “y,” which can only mean that another dog has been executed by a law enforcer. But this incident contains an added bonus. Not only was a dog injured but so was a 9-year-old kid who was in the room:
On the evening of Dec. 30, Danielle Maples was making nail polishes with her children. The atmosphere in her home changed when her husband threatened to hurt himself. Maples called 911 to get help.
Then after police arrived – as she and her husband stood outside their home unarmed – she heard two gunshots from inside.
A Wichita police officer fired at her dog – in a small living room occupied by her four children, ages 6 to 10.
Suddenly, the already stressful evening turned into a nightmare.
When the officer shot at the family dog in the same room where her four children were gathered, a bullet fragmented and ricocheted off the concrete floor beneath the carpet where her 9-year-old daughter sat. The girl suffered wounds above her eye. At the hospital, Maples saw a bag with three fragments taken from her daughter’s forehead.
Bullet ballistics are the closest thing to magic that this universe offers. It’s hard to predict all of the ways that discharging a bullet in an uncontrolled environment can go wrong. In this case an officer was trying to perform a routine dog execution that resulted in a child being hit. And what response did the family receive?
An officer later told the family that “it could have been worse,” she said.
I’m not sure if that was meant to be a thinly veiled threat or just the typical hand waving towards violence individuals detached from anything most would recognize as a conscience exhibit. Either way, this story isn’t an isolated incident. Officers perform executions on dogs so frequently that there is now a database of collected reports.
What compounds this incident is that the officer wasn’t even responding to a violent situation. A family member was suffering from a mental crisis. There is no reason that the officer should have been so tooled up. But this incident does serve to illustrate an important lesson. Never call 911 if somebody is suffering a mental crisis. If you do, law enforcers will likely be dispatched and when they show up they may decide to “help” by shooting somebody (maybe even the person suffering the mental crisis).