Girl, 5, found dead with bites

Pit bulls are suspected in the death of a Citrus girl discovered in the water near her home.

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 15, 1999

INVERNESS -- The body of a 5-year-old girl, naked and ravaged with bite marks, was found late Wednesday floating by the banks of a muck-laden swamp in the Tsala Apopka lake chain.

Gregory Blount carries one of the four dogs to an animal control truck Wednesday. [Times photo: Ron Thompson]

Authorities think Melissa Hunt was attacked by as many as four pit bullterriers she had been playing with earlier in the afternoon.

No one had seen her for some time when Gregory Blount and his brother walked to a backyard shed shortly after 6 p.m.

Before he reached the shed, Blount saw a pale figure floating in the water. The dogs had gathered nearby, quiet and watching. Blount first thought he was seeing a doll, then he looked closer.

"Ain't no way that could be a doll," Blount said.

His brother, Claude, ran to the house, where Sandra Yates Hunt, the girl's mother, was inside making dinner.

"Where's Melissa?" he screamed.

"I thought she was with you," Hunt, his girlfriend, called back.

Claude Blount ran back across the cluttered yard, past the toy kitchen appliances leaning against an old oak, and jumped into the waist-high water.

He pulled out Melissa. Her face was partly torn away, her body covered with teeth marks. A neighbor, a nurse who knew CPR, heard the screams and came running to help. It was too late.

Investigators later found the girl's ripped and frayed blue pants on the banks.

"I know it wasn't the dogs," Claude Blount, who owns the dogs, told Citrus County sheriff's investigators.

Less than two hours later, animal control officers were loading the four calm and obedient dogs, one named Yee Haw, into a caged truck bed.

Moments earlier, Claude Blount carried the girl's hysterical mother from the house to a car that took her to Citrus Memorial Hospital.

She was too distraught to talk to investigators.

The girl's death first was reported as a possible alligator attack, and several residents in the neighborhood of mobile homes and modest houses just east of the Inverness city limits on Turner Camp Road, said they had seen alligators in the marshy lake.

One woman just a few doors down said a 3-foot alligator regularly suns itself on her dock.

An officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission arrived shortly after 8 p.m. to search the shore for signs of alligators.

"'The boyfriend said he's seen gators lying in the yard," said Citrus County sheriff's Lt. Joe Eckstein. But Eckstein said the marks on the girl's body looked like dog bites.

Investigators had contacted a veterinarian to see if examining the dogs would reveal any evidence of an attack.

"One of the dogs had only been here about three weeks," Eckstein said, suggesting the possibility of tension in the pack. Eckstein said his agency would investigate the girl's death.

Confederate and American flags flew from the front of the worn gray stucco house as a thunderstorm moved in and investigators walked the water's banks.

A next door neighbor, Albert Ceraolo, said the girl had come over to his yard that afternoon to retrieve the dogs. He never knew the girl's name, but she was always friendly when she spoke.

"Hi, next door neighbor," she would say, "Hi, next door neighbor."

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