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Pet owners on guard

Neighbors are angry and worried after two pit bullterriers are implicated in several deaths and injuries.

By MARLON WALKER
Published April 16, 2006

The responsible parties - two pit bullterriers that moved into the area with their owners in December - were still alive.

One was being detained by Pinellas County Animal Services; the other was at home with its owners on quarantine.

As they waited for a final decision, neighbors said they lived in fear of the next incident.

"I want to see them both destroyed," said Stephanie Aaronson, whose dog was attacked March 28.

Aaronson was walking with her dogs when she came across two pit bullterriers roaming an alley near her St. Petersburg home. They looked like trouble, she said. So she turned around with her two dogs - Gaston, a Great Dane, and Joe, an unknown breed - and headed home.

But she had already been spotted.

She glanced back to make sure that the coast was clear but noticed that the pit bullterriers were right on her heels. The two dogs sprinted around her and launched right at Joe, she said, latching onto his neck. Afraid, Gaston darted home.

She struggled with the sight in front of her: the pit bullterrier latched on Joe's neck, trying to rip it apart.

"This isn't a dogfight," she remembered thinking. "They're trying to kill my dog."

After a while, the pit bullterriers backed off. Joe required surgery to his neck.

Aaronson wasn't too upset because she thought it was an isolated incident. Then she started hearing of the other incidents: like Dian Gorsira, who watched as her Belgian shepherd, Cali Ma, was attacked by the same dogs several weeks earlier.

Gorsira came home one day to find the pit bullterriers on her block of 23rd Avenue N chasing a cat. She and a friend watched as one of the dogs, brown with a white patch, ran off with the cat in his jaws. The cat was found dead on a nearby porch.

A woman came with a rope and restrained the dogs, but they got loose after spotting Cali Ma, who had run into Gorsira's yard to welcome her home. Gorsira said Cali Ma, afraid to run, lay on her back helplessly as the dogs latched onto her neck and upper front leg and shoulder area.

Gorsira and others fought the dogs to get them off Cali Ma. When the dogs took a short break, Gorsira said, Cali Ma "jumped up and ran around the house through the doggy door."

One pit bullterrier, Jubilee, a brown dog with a white belly, was involved in all of the attacks.

The smaller dogs - one is all white, and the other is white with a brown patch - were given the same names by the owner when questioned in all of the incidents, Aaronson said.

"I'm not here to condemn pit bulls," Gorsira said. "I'm here to condemn these dogs."

St. Petersburg police said their only option is to call Animal Services to pick up the dogs.

"We don't seize animals," said George Kajtsa, a Police Department spokesman. "We only document what happened."

Welch Agnew, assistant director of Pinellas County Animal Services, said Jubilee, the dog implicated in all of the attacks, was declared dangerous because of its involvement in more than one offense.

It was in custody awaiting an appeal from its owners, Whitney Smith and Cedric Davis of 608 24th Ave. N.

If they don't appeal or lose after filing, the dog will be euthanized, Agnew said.

[Last modified April 16, 2006, 08:51:59]