Click the arrow to view video.
Two Pit Bulls mauled an 8-year-old Willis area boy Wednesday afternoon as he rode his bicycle in the Royal Forest subdivision. Witnesses said the one dog had one of the child’s legs and the other had an arm and they were tearing his flesh as the boy screamed, until his father came running and the dogs fled into a wooded area.
It was just before 5 p.m. when Cynthia Barcus was inside her nearby house when she began to hear the boys screams over the television.
“I ran to the kitchen window and I saw a man running, which happened to be his father,” Barcus said. “And (the child) was on the ground.”
“The man was beside himself,” she said. “He’d just chase two Pit Bulls off of the boy.”
The boy was crying loudly as his father dialed 9-1-1 and his fear turned to anger.
“He was asking if anyone had a gun- he was going to shoot the dogs, but no one had one,” Barcus said. “He calmed down a little bit just to keep his son calm.”
Montgomery County EMS responded to the scene and called for a PHI Air Ambulance to transport the child to Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston.
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office and Montgomery County Animal Control also responded and began searching for the dogs, whose owners were not home.
The Animal Control unit that responded, led by Albert Richard, eventually captured the pair of Pit Bulls believed to have attacked the boy along with a third Pit Bull whose owner was on location. The third dog’s owner said hers was harmless.
She identified the first two as “Camo” and “Dee Dee” but denied knowing who owned them. The woman further stated one of the accused dogs had not only killed other dogs, but “ripped them in half.”
“She’s literally decapitated them,” she said.
Neighbors said there were usually so many dogs loose in the area that many people were afraid to walk the streets.
Barcus said she’d called authorities a few days earlier after she was working in her yard and saw the two dogs suspected of attacking the child threaten a woman who was walking with her baby in a stroller and her dog on a leash. The frightened woman turned around and went back toward her house, Barcus said.
When Animal Control arrived, she said, one dog was tied and the other was gone, so nothing could be done.
“I hope (authorities) will take this initiative to do something before something like this happens again,” she said.
