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The dog was humanely destroyed at an emergency clinic, which the man's wife said they could not afford.
By CHRIS TISCH
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 11, 2001
SAFETY HARBOR -- Lona Reisberg said there were tears in her husband's eyes after he tried to kill the couple's dog Sunday night.
Rudolph Reisberg had just slammed a 36-inch-long board and a chisel into his dog's head, an act his wife said was done out of compassion. The dog, a 20-pound terrier named Fritz, was old and sick, and needed to be put out of his misery, she said.
But minutes after Rudolph Reisberg thought he had killed Fritz, the dog revived and whimpered. So Reisberg's wife said he struck the dog again.
The dog was quiet for a few minutes, but then the couple heard more whimpers. Fritz was still alive.
"My husband thought, "If I hit him over the head, he'll die,' so he kept hitting him over the head. But he wouldn't die," Lona Reisberg said. "He would come back to life every half-hour. He kept waking up."
Neighbors heard the beatings and called the Sheriff's Office. Deputies came to the Reisberg home at 220 Lotus Drive and arrested Rudolph Reisberg, 59, on a felony animal cruelty charge. He remained jailed on $10,000 bail.
Deputies took Fritz to an emergency clinic. A doctor humanely destroyed the dog because of his age and the seriousness of his injuries, sheriff's office spokesman Sgt. Greg Tita said.
Lona Reisberg said Monday that her husband wasn't trying to be cruel to the dog. She said the couple couldn't afford to pay to have the dog humanely destroyed.
"He tried to put him out of his misery," said Lona Reisberg, who added that the couple have a cat and two other dogs. "My husband would not hurt a fly."
She said her husband wanted to bury the dog after the second beating, but she wouldn't let him because she wasn't certain Fritz was dead.
"Then I went to the back porch and he started to cry," she said of the dog. "And then he (Rudolph) went and hit him again. My husband hit him very hard to make sure he didn't come to life anymore. But he (the dog) cried and cried and cried. It was very heartbreaking.
"My husband was crying like a baby," she added. "It hurt him more than anything, having to kill that dog. My husband was crying more than the dog."
But the old days of taking the sick family dog behind the barn to shoot it are gone, said Greg Andrews, operations manager for Pinellas County Animal Services.
The county agency charges $10 to humanely destroy a dog by injection, and another $10 to cremate the remains.
"We would prefer that people do it humanely so it's swift and painless for the pet," said Andrews, who described beating a dog to death as "inhumane."
Lona Reisberg said her daughter found Fritz as a stray about three years ago. He was skinny and marked with sores, but the couple took him into their home. She said Fritz, who was about 17 years old when he died, was close to her husband.
"He slept with him every night. He was a very lovable dog," she said.
But she said Fritz was getting sick. In the past week, he started crying in pain, urinating in the house and stumbling.
Lona Reisberg said she understands now that her husband shouldn't have tried to kill the dog. Still, she doesn't think he should have been arrested.
"He did not do it out of meanness," she said. "He did it out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted to put the dog out of his misery and it was the wrong way of doing it. It was the wrong thing to do because if we had known he would have suffered like that, I would have never done that and I know my husband wouldn't have either.
"The bad part is that poor dog had to suffer because he kept coming back to life."