Greenpoint Couple Seeks Justice For Dog Attacks
GREENPOINT – A Greenpoint couple recently launched a Facebook page to warn their neighbors about an irresponsible dog owner and his dangerous dog that viciously attacked their pet last month.
Lauren Bender and Greg Stevens moved to Greenpoint six months ago with their 10-year-old Shar Pei, Monk. The dog attack took place at approximately 8:30am on Tuesday, October 24 at Transmitter Park during off-leash hours (NYC Parks requires dogs be on-leash between 9am to 9pm).
“I was the one walking Monk. I’ve known Monk since he was a pup,” Matteo, a friend of the couple’s, recalls. “Monk and I had gotten to just about the end of our time at the park and we were heading toward the exit. I was about to hook him back onto his leash when we noticed a gentleman show up with a small dog at the entrance.”
The other man and the black dog were approximately 30 feet away from Monk and Matteo.
“Nothing was out of the ordinary and there was no reason for me to suspect that there would be a problem,” Matteo says. “As soon as he took that dog off the leash, it made a beeline directly to Monk. There was no interaction, no growling, no posturing. This was just a direct attack.”
Matteo describes the violent scene. “She attached at his neck first. Monk was trying to get away. He wasn’t even fighting back. He’s a gentle animal. It escalated and she grabbed onto his right haunch.”
The attack lasted between 20 to 30 seconds, according to Matteo. “We finally got them separated. Rather than get this guy’s information, which I should have done, I was more concerned about Monk. He was in shock. He was trying to leave the park.”
Matteo remembers that the man, who had a British accent, said to him, “this isn’t even my dog,” once they separated the two animals. It was later discovered that the man was the brother of the dog’s owner.
Monk was taken to Long Island City Veterinary Center where he had to undergo three procedures and had sutures put in along the length of his right side and a series of tubes inserted into his wounds to allow any infection to drain out. The veterinarian said that Monk’s case “was the most severe case they’d seen,” Stevens told BKLYNER over the telephone last week. The vet bills for the surgeries and medications have tallied up to approximately $2,000, according to the couple.
After the initial attack, Matteo spent hours at the park trying to find the dog and its owner, Bender says. At this point, all they knew was that the dog that attacked Monk was small (20-25 pounds), black with shaggy hair and a rope-like leash, accompanied by a man with a British accent.
A week and a half later, the shaggy-haired black dog went after Monk again. Bender took Monk for a walk at approximately 6:30am on Saturday, November 4. “He still had his tubes in and he still had his [medical] cone,” she remembers. “Nobody was in the park except one golden retriever puppy and its owner. They were on one side [of the park] and Monk and I were on the other, down by the water.”
Suddenly, Bender says, “I saw this black dog off-leash doing a beeline for Monk exactly in the same way that Matteo had described. I screamed and I crouched and positioned myself between this dog and Monk. Because of the screaming and because of my action, I think it probably terrified the dog enough to get it to stop,” she says. “Then [the dog’s owner—a man with a British accent holding a rope leash] casually walks across the park. I’m yelling at him to put his dog on a leash. I explained to him that my dog had been attacked by a dog that matched his dog’s description.”
“I started asking him questions and he claimed to know absolutely nothing about [the previous attack] and said that his dog had never been aggressive or attacked anything,” Bender recalls. “I told him that because [the description of him and his dog] matched so closely that I couldn’t let him leave the park without getting his information. He was hesitant but I wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”
They walked over to the woman with the golden retriever puppy, who had heard the screaming, and she helped Bender get the man’s name and took a picture of his dog. Though he initially resisted, the man agreed to give Bender his full name and telephone number.
According to Bender, the man said he understood her concerns and told her, “I’m a responsible dog owner.” He said the right things and was able to convince Bender that perhaps his dog wasn’t the one that originally attacked Monk.
After sending the man texts all weekend long and not receiving a response, the couple posted flyers around the park warning neighbors about his dangerous dog. They also launched the Facebook page to warn the community about the dog and to try to connect with someone who knew the man so they could reach out to him. “We launched it on that Sunday, November 5, and then when we heard from him on the 6th, we took it down because we thought we were going to meet him,” Bender explains.
He said that he’d spoken to his brother and was “aware there was an incident,” Stevens says. “He basically fessed up to the attack that Matteo was part of. We were right on the cusp of meeting with him and 30 minutes right before we were supposed to meet, he pulled the plug on it.”
Bender and Stevens wanted to meet with the dog owner and confirm that it was his dog that attacked Monk and try to convince him to keep his dog on a leash. However, after agreeing to meet with the couple, the dog owner saw the Facebook page they created and cancelled. “He sent us a message that he wasn’t going to meet us and that’s when we relaunched the Facebook page with his name on it trying to get anybody who knows him to convince him that this is a serious thing and that he needs to take responsibility,” Bender explains.
Along with many others in the neighborhood who claim to have also been attacked or have seen the dog acting aggressively, the Facebook page connected Monk’s owners to two dog walkers who previously walked the dangerous dog when its owner lived in midtown Manhattan.
“We’ve obtained a lot of information from his two former dog walkers,” Stevens says. “The initial person was so shocked by the dog’s behavior that they basically quit.”
Between information collected from the two dog walkers, the couple learned that the dog and its owner moved to Greenpoint approximately a month prior to the attack on Monk. According to both dog walkers, the man moved to Greennpoint because of his dog’s history of attacking other dogs, multiple people, and even a child, at his previous residence. According to the couple, one of the dog walkers said the man takes his dog’s aggressive tendencies lightly and has said, “It’s cruel to put a dog on a leash.”
“I actually think it’s pretty cruel to allow your dog to maul other animals and humans and be completely dismissive about it and not take any responsibility,” Stevens retorts.
“The most galling aspect is that we’ve had long conversations with both of his former dog walkers and one of them mentioned that he basically thinks that this is a joke,” Stevens says. “There are children in that park. There’s a playground in Transmitter Park. God forbid something happens to a little person down there. The fact that he knows his dog has wreaked this kind of carnage and he takes it as a light-hearted joke is just sickening.”
“We have three to four confirmed human bites,” Stevens adds. “This isn’t ‘if it happens,’ it’s already happened. What do you think the odds are it’s going happening again? Probably pretty good. That’s what’s frustrating. We don’t want to see anybody else get hurt.”
“To learn about this growing record of injury that he’s been aware of, and doesn’t take precautions to stop, leads us to where we’ve gotten to,” Bender says, “which is the jurisdiction issues of what happens when one precinct knows about a dog attacking a dog, and another precinct knows about a dog hurting people. Why aren’t these precincts responsible for communicating with each other? Why doesn’t New York have a dangerous dog law?”
As BKLYNER reported this past summer following a vicious dog attack in South Slope, New York currently does not have a law that holds dog owners accountable if their dog attacks another dog. “911 accepts reports of animals currently threatening or endangering people,” a 311 operator informed BKLYNER, however callers “cannot file a complaint about animals that have bitten other animals.”
Attorney Kenneth M. Phillips, a California-based lawyer specializing in dog bite law, commented on a BKLYNER article posted on August 18 about a Sunset Park man’s arrest in the stabbing death of a pit bull who attacked his dog. Phillips said, “New York’s dog laws were derived from England cases in the 1600’s and 1700’s, and have devolved into the most unfair in the USA, totally lopsided in favor of violent, vicious dogs and their irresponsible owners.” He suggested dog owners “clamor for new laws that hold dog owners liable for injuring other people’s dogs (and other people too).”
“A number of jurisdictions already have enacted some form of irresponsible dog owner law,” according to Phillips’ website. “For example, the city of Omaha, Nebraska, has the following ‘reckless dog owner’ ordinance:
Omaha, Nebraska, Code of Ordinances, section 6-1:
Reckless owner: An owner who has been convicted of one or more violations of this chapter on three separate occasions in a 24-month period or who has not complied with the requirements for ownership of a dangerous or potentially dangerous animal.”
The site provides a model irresponsible dog owner law drafted by Phillips, as well as a model dangerous dog law, model dog bite statue, and information on how to change the law.
Bender and Stevens went to the “irresponsible dog owner’s” previous residence in Manhattan where building staff confirmed he had lived but otherwise did not want to get involved. They also went to both the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint and the 17th Precinct in Manhattan.
“The initial visit was to our neighborhood precinct, the 94th. The police have been very compassionate, and their community liaison has been great. We have a lot of respect for the precinct, we would just like to see a greater coordination [between the precincts],” Stevens says.
The 17th Precinct in Manhattan told the couple that a police report was filed for one of the attacks on a human by the man’s dog, but they said they could not disclose that information, Stevens says. The 17th Precinct basically told the couple since they live in Greenpoint that they had to be deal with the 94th Precinct.
“The 94th and 17th Precincts are not coordinating even though they’ve got a database full of police reports,” Stevens says. “Nobody is really taking responsibility for this.”
“They don’t have a law that they can do anything under,” Bender adds. “What they’re telling us is they can go and look for this dog at the park, like Matteo did for weeks on end. The worst they could do is give this guy a summons for having his dog off leash. There’s nothing that the law is doing to protect us. This guy isn’t seen as a criminal. He’s seen as somebody who did damage to someone’s property,” she explains. The police have basically told the couple their only recourse is to sue the man for civil damages.
“The dog is essentially a weapon of sorts but it’s not treated as the same category even though it can do just as much damage as a knife,” Stevens notes.
Stevens says he recently encountered an older couple who lives on their block walking their little dog. The husband said since they’d learned about Monk’s attack, they don’t go to the park anymore. “That’s exactly the wrong thing that should be happening here,” Stevens insists. “Everyone but this person has to live in fear and not be able to do the things that they’re responsibly doing, and this person just gets to do whatever he wants and we all have to compensate.”
“He doesn’t seem to be taking any of this seriously or taking responsibility around this,” Bender says of the other dog owner. “There’s no indication to us that has he’s corrected his choice to let his dog off-leash or that he actually even understands that his dog is dangerous.”
“The problem is not a bad dog, the problem is a bad dog owner,” she adds. “We don’t want this dog to take away the off-leash hours for the dogs who deserve to have it.”
The couple would ultimately like their Council Member, Stephen Levin, and other local officials to support and recognize that a law needs to be placed into action in all boroughs, Bender says. The couple plans to write a letter to Levin’s office and attend the next Greenpoint community board meeting to try to get a dangerous dog law passed that would hold a dog owner accountable for his dog’s behavior and have all reports of a dog’s attacks follow the dog owner wherever he and the dog move to in the city.
The couple would also like to see enforcement for those deemed irresponsible dog owners to keep their dog on a leash or in a muzzle if the dog is known to have harmed other people or dogs. “There are ways of making sure that a dangerous dog can’t harm somebody. These are simple steps that make it possible so we don’t have to talk about euthanizing or things like that,” Bender says.
The couple also wants more coordination between the ASPCA, Animal Control, and the NYPD, perhaps a single system where the agencies can enter information on irresponsible dog owners so that there is a consistent record. “It’s just about getting all of his files following him, as opposed to his being able to think that he can move from place to place and not have this track record [follow him] like any other crime,” Bender explains.
For the time being, the “bare minimum intention here,” Stevens says is to get him to “act responsibly and keep his animal on a leash.”
As for Monk, he’s on the mend. “Visually the scars are looking much better to us but we’re still waiting for him to feel normal and comfortable walking on the streets,” Bender says. “He’s still super cautious of other dogs, sounds, and people.”