Girl Testifies She was Afraid Dog Would Hurt Her Again
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, www.ajc.com
September 21, 2000--On the night her neighbor’s dog mauled her and sent her to the emergency room, Amber Cannon dreamed the animal got loose and killed her. When she woke up, Amber testified Wednesday in Hall County State Court in Gainesville, she looked outside to see the mixed shepherd-husky still chained to a tree next door.
The dog remained there for two more days
“It scared me a lot,” 10- year-old Amber calmly told the jurors who will decide whether her police officer father, Ken Cannon, broke the law when he killed the dog more than a week later.
Day 2 of Cannon’s trial went much like the first. Testimony focused more on his daughter’s attack than on Cannon’s execution of the dog with two shots from an AR-15 assault rifle.
The six-member jury will decide whether Cannon is guilty of cruelty to a dog and discharging a weapon within 50 feet of a roadway. Under the state’s dog cruelty statute, Cannon must prove he shot the dog to stop injury “being caused” by the animal.
Cannon is expected to testify today that his little girl’s nightmares and a fear for the neighborhood’s safety left him no choice but to kill Bud when animal control officials failed to keep the dog away.
But according to his wife’s and daughter’s testimony Wednesday, they were out of town in Mississippi when Cannon shot Bud.
Earlier in the day, Hall County Sheriff’s Investigator Gerald Couch also testified that the dog was not attacking anyone when it was killed. He did say the animal was a “public safety issue,” however, because it wasn’t fenced in and there were no signs warning passers-by about the dog.
Defense attorney Dan Summer has pounded on that theme throughout the trial, and he made every attempt Wednesday to blame animal control officials for not doing their jobs.
Hall County Animal Control Director Rick Phillips admitted he took the dog’s owner, Linda Carpenter, at her word after the attack when she told him Bud had been vaccinated against rabies. According to testimony, there is no record the dog was vaccinated, despite Carpenter’s insistence that it was.
Phillips had told Cannon in a taped telephone conversation shortly after his daughter’s attack that he had confirmed the dog was vaccinated.
Phillips admitted they might not be at trial now had he known the vaccination couldn’t be verified.
The jury will get the case this afternoon or Friday morning.
