M. ALEXANDER OTTO; The News Tribune
Almost three years before a neighbor's pit bulls attacked and seriously injured Sue Gorman, other dogs from the same Key Peninsula house menaced a 15-month-old girl.
Jaidenn Foster was with her mother, Jenna, in the front yard of the family home Sept. 7, 2004, when she said a chocolate Labrador retriever named Mocha and a German shepherd mix named Daisy came into the yard.
"She tried to pet them," Jenna Foster said in a recent interview. "They pushed her down."
The girl ran screaming for her mother, and the dogs pursued her, Foster said. She made it a few feet, then fell and scratched her face and a knee before her mother scooped her up and ran into the house. Jaidenn's father, Howard Foster, ran out of the house with his son and chased the dogs off, he said.
Jaidenn wasn't the only one who had close calls with dogs from Shellie Wilson's house long before Gorman was attacked in her home and a neighbor boy's Jack Russell terrier killed Aug. 21.
According to Pierce County records obtained by The News Tribune, animal control officers cited Wilson twice in 1998 at her previous residence and made 16 visits to her current home since 1999 for dog complaints from at least eight neighbors.
They cited Wilson a total of 10 times for roaming or unlicensed dogs.
But the anger of neighbors and repeat visits from county animal control officers didn't solve the problem.
"I'm not surprised" someone was finally hurt, Howard Foster said recently.
Wilson – who with her son, Zach Martin, 18, pleaded not guilty Thursday to criminal charges in connection with the attack on Gorman – admitted to The News Tribune that there have been problems.
But she said her neighbors are exaggerating, the records might have some inaccuracies and that other neighbors' dogs run free sometimes, too.
"Dogs get out. I don't know what else to say," Wilson said. "It's not like we haven't attempted" to keep them confined.
Wilson also said she's been busy working two to three jobs to make ends meet, raising her son and caring for a one-time boyfriend seriously hurt in a construction accident in 2004.
"With priorities like that, I didn't really care about the neighbors or the dogs," said Wilson, 45.
Martin's name appears only once in the records as the owner of one of the pit bulls that attacked Gorman, but Wilson's name appears again and again as the person who wouldn't or couldn't keep the dogs behind a fence or on a leash.
County documents show that since 1999, Wilson has owned a series of dogs that attacked other people's pets and threatened neighbors. The records also show that the dogs were allowed to roam, and that when the animals were impounded, Wilson got others.
They also contain numerous complaints from neighbors that Wilson's dogs were neglected.
Warnings and citations did no good. The dog problems continued for almost a decade, the records show.
"I look at the many times we have been here and I wonder what it will take for this dog owner to start being more responsible," Patrice Aarhaus wrote on Oct. 2, 2004. Aarhaus, at the time an animal control officer, had impounded Mocha and Daisy, not for the near-attack on Jaidenn Foster but because the animals were roaming and disturbing neighbors.
Just two weeks earlier, Wilson had told animal control that she'd gotten rid of the dogs. She wouldn't answer the door on Oct. 1, according to records.
"All of the neighbors in the entire cul-de-sac have spoken to the owner at one time or another about the dogs, to no avail," Aarhaus wrote.
Aarhaus was one of at least six officers to visit Wilson's property over the years. On that day, she wrote Wilson four tickets totaling $412.
"I cited them on whatever I could just to hammer them," Aarhaus said recently. "More than one person came up to me and said they were sick of this."
However, the tickets and two others issued a little over a year ago for $206 were never paid, according to Pierce County District Court workers, and have been turned over to the county's collection service.
Howard Foster and other neighbors said animal control should have done more.
"They are people who shouldn't be allowed to have dogs because they don't know how to take care of them," he said.
Under current rules, Aarhaus said, animal control officers can't prevent someone from getting a dog unless there's a record of animal cruelty, which was never alleged against Wilson.
The only other options are citations and impoundments, even when they don't work.
"There needs to be some kind of (law) that (irresponsible owners) are not allowed to have dogs for a certain number of years," Aarhaus said.
The Tacoma City Council is considering changing the city's animal control ordinance along those lines. Under the proposed change, pet owners who commit three or more animal control violations in a 24-month period could be declared "problem pet owners" and be made to give up their animals.
DANGEROUS SITUATIONS
Howard Foster's call about the near-attack on his daughter in 2004 wasn't his first complaint to animal control. Twice in 2001, he reported that dogs from Wilson's home had come onto his yard and tried to attack his dog, according to records. They chased his wife, growling when she tried to shoo them off, he said.
Foster said he never received the forms he requested from animal control to start "dangerous dog" proceedings against Wilson.
He moved his family out of the neighborhood in 2005, in part, he said, to get away from the dog problems.
"I just got sick and tired of it," he said.
He was always angry, Jenna Foster said, "because our kids (could not) go outside. Our son wanted to skateboard," but the dogs would chase him.
Another neighbor, Ken Wick, agreed that Wilson and her son shouldn't own dogs.
"It's obvious they don't know how to contain a dog, or have a lack of interest," he said.
Wick has had his own run-in with Wilson's dogs.
On Aug. 31, 2006, he pulled up into his driveway and two pit bulls from her house cornered him in his garage, he said. He shot at them with a BB gun and yelled for his wife to get his shotgun, but she couldn't find the shells.
They ran off when Wick's wife, Louise, came out of the house and yelled at them, she said.
The dogs charged Wick after having blocked Brad King and William Wold in their house across the street for an hour and half, according to records and King.
"Brad opened the side door to the garage and there were two pit bull dogs, one male, one female," Wold wrote in a statement to animal control.
King said that the dogs might have been after the food he kept in his garage for his papillon, Toby, whose jaw was crippled in an attack by one of Wilson's dogs and another neighborhood dog in 2004.
The pit bulls "started to bark and lunge at us," Wold wrote. "We shut the door. The dogs went around the back and barked at us through the patio door."
By the time animal control officer Tim Anderson arrived, they were gone.
"I contacted (Wilson), who admitted the dogs frequently get loose and run at large," Anderson stated in his report on the incident. "She was unsure of the exact current location of both dogs."
He wrote her a ticket for "animals at large" and another for "license required," totaling $206. They haven't been paid.
Other neighbors have had problems, too.
Ricky Russell, whose dog, Romeo, was killed by dogs from the Wilson house during the attack on Gorman, was almost attacked by one of the pit bulls from her house Feb. 22 as he rode a scooter in front of his house, records show.
"The pit bull charged up (to the boy) and almost attacked him," the records state. "When the baby sitter yelled at the dog to go home, it started getting closer and started barking."
The sitter was eventually able to drive the dog off.
DOGS BEING DOGS
Wilson's neighbors don't blame her dogs. They say the animals were just doing what dogs do when left on their own: form a pack, get territorial and scavenge for food. Sometimes it's worse, said Aarhaus, the animal control officer.
When neglected and left to wander, "you set dogs up for being chased at, kicked and hit with rocks," she said. So with every stranger, they start to think, "I'm going to attack before they get me."
Records show that at least seven dogs have stayed at Wilson's house since 1999 – Buck, Lucy and Mocha, Labrador retrievers; Daisy, the German shepherd mix; Bertha, a springer spaniel; and Betty and Tank, the pit bulls that attacked Gorman and the Jack Russell terrier.
Neighbors say there have been puppies, too, and dogs brought by people who lived with Wilson and her son temporarily.
"They always had new dogs there," Jenna Foster said. "You felt sorry for the dogs. They were hungry."
Sue Nelson, an animal lover with dogs of her own, lives next door to Wilson and made neglect reports about her to animal control five times since 2000.
She called once in 2000 to report dogs in her garbage looking for food, twice in 2001 to report dogs left for days without food or water, once in 2002 about dogs from Wilson's running lose, and once in 2006 to report that Wilson had left a dog in heat tied up outside, drawing male dogs like flies.
"Shellie says dogs can take care of themselves, but they can't," Nelson said in a recent interview.
The weekend before the attack on Gorman, Tank and Betty had been left in Wilson's back yard, Nelson said.
Tank, who was destroyed by the Humane Society on Sept. 25, "was out in that yard, tied up to the deck, with no cover," she said. "It poured rain two of those days."
Betty, who remains at the Humane Society as evidence in the Gorman attack, was loose in the yard, Nelson said.
"They were back there crying and crying," she said. "I wanted to take them out of there and over here."
Neighbor Wick and his wife, Louise, called animal control three times about Wilson's dogs running loose and tearing up garbage.
"You'd see them barking at the fence, yapping, lonely, looking for somebody," Ken Wick said.
There was a wire fence around Wilson's backyard held down with stakes, but neighbors said it wasn't secure. After one animal control visit, Nelson said, Martin, Wilson's son, rolled big logs in front of a gap, but dogs continued to get out.
Nelson and Jenna Foster remember dogs getting their heads stuck while trying to get out under Wilson's fence.
Sometimes, they'd come over to Nelson's house for food, and sleep on her front yard, the couple said. Other times, the dogs would roam.
NO MORE DOGS
Wilson told The News Tribune she had dogs because "we love them" and "need watchdogs." But she said she doesn't plan to have any more after the attack on Gorman.
"I don't think it's fair to the neighbors and (it's) not good for the dogs," she said.
Meanwhile, Gorman has hired an attorney and is planning to sue Wilson, and perhaps others, said her friend Leana Beasley.
M. Alexander Otto: 253-597-8616
alex.otto@thenewstribune.com
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