ALIQUIPPA, Pa. — The body camera video shows the officer leaving the station and making the short drive over to the distraught man. He rolls down the window and listens to the complaint about the dogs who had wandered over, killed a chicken and were busy eating it.
The chicken’s angry owner would later find out the dogs killed five more birds, but not before Paul Woods put his car in park, retrieved his rifle, walked to where he had the dogs in his line of sight and shot one of them in the face.
That shot, which sent both dogs scampering into the woods, is now at the center of a controversy between the City of Aliquippa and animal rights activists who have threatened legal action, saying it was an unnecessary use of force.
The injured dog, Diamond, survived the shooting. He had spent months on the run after escaping his home before the chicken encounter, and would spend a few more weeks wandering the woods, injured, until he was found and medical care began.
Susan Niedergal, an administrator with Beaver County Lost Pets, tracked him the entire time.
Niedergal said the dogs were behaving as a starving animal might: hunting for food when they were otherwise not aggressive.
She said Woods should have tried to corral the dogs before opening fire.
“On the police report, the officer sergeant stated that the dog lunged at him, and in the video you can clearly see him exiting the vehicle, going to the front of the vehicle, and within two seconds fired at these dogs,” Niedergal said. “I have police officers that literally help search after hours on their own to help us bring dogs home. We can’t have a police officer pulling up on a situation and pulling out a gun and just shooting a dog because it’s trying to survive.”
Neither Woods nor Aliquippa police or city leadership responded to 11 Investigates’ request for an interview about the shooting. Aliquippa also ignored a Right to Know request asking for the department’s use-of-force policy.
Police officers in other agencies said they would not hesitate to shoot a dog if it was attacking something or threatening someone’s safety, but otherwise they would try to avoid lethal force because of the optics alone. Niedergal and Diamond’s new owners have spent the past year fighting for the release of the body camera footage and pressing the department to reinforce a shoot second mentality when possible, correspondence many administrators consider a headache to head off whenever they can.
11 Investigates read through neighboring Allegheny County’s policy instead. The policy echoed the other officers’ sentiments, allowing a lethal use of force when an animal like a dog is actively in attack mode. However, if there is no active attack or threat posed by the dog, the police discourages lethal force and requests the officer obtain permission from an animal’s owner before taking a shot.
The shooting on the bodycam was obscured by Woods’ hands and rifle and it’s not clear whether Diamond lunged at the officer or prepared to, as he suggested in his report.
Diamond did not show any signs of aggression toward humans approximately nine months after the shooting, when his new owner, Rachel Byrge, interviewed for this story – though he greatly preferred that the smaller of two cameras brought to the interview stayed in its bag.
Rachel, like Susan, said she did not want any negative outcomes to befall Woods or APD. Instead, she said she was thinking about the next lost dog.
“Somebody else’s dog is going to get lost, and they shouldn’t be shot at and have this trauma and pain if they survive it how Diamond did,” she said.
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