CRESTVIEW — An Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office deputy shot and killed a pit bull that lunged at him around 3 a.m. Sunday in the Farmer Street area, where someone reported hearing things being broken at a nearby concrete plant.
As the deputy exited his patrol car and locked it, he didn’t hear noise from the plant, but did hear a dog barking and a man saying, “Whoa, whoa!” according to the OCSO offense report. The deputy then saw a medium-sized dog running from a yard across the street from him. The dog left the yard and approached the deputy as the man in the yard tried to call the animal back.
The deputy backed up, pulled his gun from the holster and yelled for the dog to stop. “When the dog was at my feet, I shot the dog two times, killing the dog,” the deputy wrote in his report. He then called for back-up.
The dog’s owner, Matthew Phelan, and his father, James, approached the deputy and his supervisor complaining that the dog had been shot and stating “the dog did not go to bite him,” the report said.
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This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Family mourning after Okaloosa sheriff's deputy shoots dog