Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 5, 1995 TAG: 9508070032
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A week ago a trio of Rottweilers attacked her and slashed and chewed her right arm "like a pork chop or steak," Viar testified Friday as she sat in a wheelchair, her arm bandaged, splinted and lying on an armrest. "They just tore it all to pieces."
After hearing from Viar and other witnesses, Judge Vincent Lilley ordered that the dogs - Andre, Myla and Mufasa - be destroyed.
Lilley also convicted the two owners of keeping vicious dogs and fined them $100 each.
Lillie W. Gray and her daughter-in-law, Venus L. Gray, had been keeping the dogs together in a pen in the back yard of their home on Salem Avenue Southwest.
Lillie Gray said the Rottweilers were pets and watchdogs. She said none of them had shown any signs of being vicious. They'd been around her grandchildren and neighborhood children and had never bitten any of them, she said.
"Kids want to come up and pet them," she said. "And we let them."
Her dog, Andre, a full-grown male, weighed about 100 pounds. The other two were owned by Venus Gray. They were several months old, and weighed 40 to 60 pounds each.
Venus Gray's husband, Anthony Gray, testified that he latched them in their pen the night of July 27. But somehow they got out. Venus Gray told the judge that she'd learned that someone - she didn't say who - had come into the yard and let them out.
About 3:20 the next morning, three dogs attacked Robert Shelton, 52, as he walked to work along Salem Avenue. He said one jumped on his back and bit him, then they were all over him. He fought them off, picked up a bottle and threw it, and the dogs ran away. Shelton believes they were the Grays' dogs.
A little more than an hour later, Carolyn Viar was delivering newspapers on Westport Avenue Southwest, just behind the Grays' house, when she turned and saw three Rottweilers coming at her.
"I didn't have nowhere to go," she said. "I didn't know what was happening."
They slashed at her back, leg, arm and chest - injuries that put her in the hospital for five days.
She screamed for her husband, who was circling the block in their car. He heard her and jumped out and ran to her.
Ron Viar said one of the dogs was on her chest and seemed to be going for her throat when he punched it between the eyes and again in the jaw. He grabbed one of smaller dogs and slammed it against a wall.
Carolyn Viar was able to get to a nearby apartment, but Ron Viar said the dogs continued to snarl at him. The bigger dog "looked like it was throwing saliva everywhere." One of the younger ones came at him, but he kicked it in the throat.
By the time police arrived, the Grays had come out and taken control of the dogs.
Lillie Gray did not dispute that the dogs had attacked Shelton and the Viars.
But she said they'd never gotten loose before and she'd taken steps to make sure of that. "Why would we pay so much money to have pens put up and then let them loose?" Gray asked the judge.
Lilley said that didn't matter. He said it was against the law to own a vicious dog in the city, penned or not.
by CNB