A Disturbing Article

Published on Saturday, March 24, 2007

I hope that these dogs are eventually found and destroyed. I'm not much on Pit bulls. When I was a girl, a neighbor raised pit bulls for dog fights. Our dog, Prince a poodle and spaniel mix was almost killed by one of them. My sister at the age of 11 fought the dog. It didn't release Prince until a friend of the family came running up with a 2x4 and hit the pit bull in the head. Prince survived ...barely.

Go ahead Peta Heads... try to explain this away.

Pit bulls tear up schnauzer


By Laura Arenschield
Staff writer

Bobo, a miniature schnauzer, died a violent death Wednesday, ripped apart by two pit bulls nearly four times his size.

But the attack on the little dog is not the worst that could have happened. About 40 children were asleep in a day-care center next to Bobo’s house. Now parents, day-care providers and Bobo’s owners can’t stop thinking: What if the toddlers would have been in their yard? What if the dogs would have gone after the children?

“My children play out there every day,” said Tia Nobles, whose twin 3-year-olds go to the Simon Temple Day Care Center on Adobe Court. “I’m terrified right now.”

Grace Woolard, Bobo’s owner, said she heard her fence shaking and rattling around lunchtime Wednesday. She walked onto her deck and saw the two pit bulls — one dark brown, one a rusty red — with their jaws locked on Bobo’s neck.

Woolard said she started screaming for her husband. She grabbed a lawn chair and threw it at the dogs. She pulled the top off her grill and threw that, too. She grabbed a stick. Nothing made them stop.

“They were grabbing him like a piece of meat they were fighting over,” she said. “I just can’t get that out of my mind.”

The pit bulls dragged the schnauzer around the side of the Woolards’ house. Woolard’s husband, Herman, was looking for his shotgun. He looked out the back window in time to see a man pulling the dogs over the fence and into a small green car. Then the car took off.

LaToya McGirt, who has worked at the day-care center for four years, said she heard Bobo whimpering around noon. The toddlers McGirt watches were napping, and she was in the kitchen getting something to drink. Then she heard Grace Woolard scream.

McGirt said she looked out the kitchen window and saw the pit bulls attacking the schnauzer.

McGirt called 911. Then she ran outside.

“I didn’t hear the dog whimpering anymore,” McGirt said. “And so I knew that he was unconscious or dead.”

By the time police and an animal control officer got to the Woolards’ house, the car with the pit bulls had driven away.

Sue Nicholson, director of Cumberland County Animal Control, said an officer is investigating the attack, but said there are few details. No one could provide a clear description of the man or his car. No one is sure where the man came from or where he went. Still, she said, the office will continue to investigate the attack.

The Woolards buried Bobo in their backyard with his toys. The children at the day-care center have been asking all week why Bobo can’t come out and play.

It breaks Grace Woolard’s heart when they ask, and it scares all the adults to think of what could have happened.

“If it would have been an hour earlier, my kids would have been outside,” McGirt said. “That could have been one of my children, or myself, trying to protect them.”