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Monday July 17 2000 By Brian D. Crecente, an APBnews.com correspondent in Florida.
Tossed into a fighting pit with a trained and vicious dog, the pet pit bull lasted only 15 minutes. He was put there by Deroy Dawes, a 19-year-old who had found the dog wandering the streets of a coastal South Florida town a week earlier, police say. After the April 4 fight, Dawes told police he washed the blood from the dog's body, walked him to a nearby house and chained him to a backyard fence, where he died hours later. Shack's owner, Alonzo Austin, found him the same day and buried him where he lay. It was a week after Austin had reported the dog he had owned for three years missing. "I couldn't move him, I'd gone through so much," Austin said. "For me to see my baby like that, it really hurt me." Police arrested Dawes April 27 on felony charges of fighting animals and animal cruelty, making him the first person in Palm Beach County to be charged in five years. "He told us he fought Shack because he wanted to see what he could do," said Liz Roerich, an animal control officer in Boynton Beach, a small coastal city between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. "It's becoming fashionable for teens to have pit bulls and fight them." People have a 'blood lust' Police say dogfights are growing in popularity across the country, but are at their worst in a handful of Southern states, including Florida. "Rich folks, poor folks, smart folks, stupid folks -- the only thing they all have in common is the blood lust of fighting and baiting dogs," said Palm Beach County sheriff's Cpl. John Howley, whose mounted patrol unit has investigated animal cruelty cases throughout the county since 1998. "And there's quite a lot of it going on in Palm Beach County." His four animal cruelty investigators work closely with the 14-member cruelty investigation unit of Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control. Lt. Gina DiPace, who heads the unit, said the department is working 21 cases and estimates that they have investigated 50 dogfighting cases last year. "There is probably some fighting going on every weekend in this county," she said. Hard to find reason to charge Only three people in Palm Beach County have been convicted of the felony crime since 1995, officials at Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office say. That's because under the current law you would have to catch a dogfight in progress and prove it was intentional to charge someone with the crime, said sheriff's Deputy Cassie Kovacs, who specializes in dogfighting investigations. Dawes was charged because he confessed, according to a warrant. "There are loopholes in the law," Kovacs said. "The last few I did I had to get them for animal cruelty because I couldn't prove the dogfighting. It's very frustrating." Aberration in the law Prosecutors say another problem is that the law forbids dogfights but allows a person to own a fighting dog or train dogs for fighting. "It is an absolute aberration in the law that allows individuals to actively breed animals whose only purpose is to fight but to outlaw the fighting," said Mike Edmondson, spokesman for Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer. State Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, introduced a bill to the legislature this year that would have made it a third-degree felony to "own, possess, keep, train, promote, transport, purchase or sell any animal for the purpose of fighting or baiting." The bill, which covers both dogfights and cockfights, passed unanimously in the Senate, but died in the House when it was unable to get a hearing. "We know that this kind of activity is going on in the state," said Klein, who plans to reintroduce the bill next year. "It's inhumane, and it's not the kind of thing we want to condone in this state." Fight-watching a felony in 13 states Fort Myers State Attorney Joseph P. D'Alessandro also is lobbying state lawmakers in Tallahassee to upgrade the charge of attending a dogfight from a misdemeanor to a felony, after 21 people in Lee County were charged with the crime April 9. Attending a dogfight is illegal in all but four states, but it's a felony in only 13. The Humane Society of the United States estimates that more than 40,000 people are involved in dogfights around the country, said Humane Society dogfighting expert Eric Sakach. "The southeast part of the country is generally considered to be one of the heavier spots," said Sakach, who is based in Sacramento, Calif. "But I can't go anywhere in the country without agencies saying that they are seeing a great deal of dogfighting." And, Sakach said, it's a growing problem. "It's going to get worse before it gets better," he said. "It says something about society in general and where we are headed, especially in situations where we see children brought to these events -- another generation of little idiots who are not bothered by this sort of violence." Thousands of dollars change hands Sakach added that dogfighters are typically involved in other serious crimes as well. In 1997, Broward County Sheriff's deputies happened upon a dogfighting operation in a warehouse and arrested four people. They also seized rock cocaine, marijuana and the bloodstained remains of a carpet and a plywood dogfighting pit, according to sheriff's office reports. "This is a very, very, very serious problem," said Broward County sheriff's Detective Mike Vadnal, who has been investigating dogfighting for seven years. "To start with, you have people who enjoy watching a blood sport. That shows their mentality. Then you have gambling, narcotics and weapons at these fights. You are dealing with a pretty bad element." Broward County Sheriff's Sgt. Sherry Schlueter says dogfighting in south Florida increased significantly over the past five to 10 years. "Thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, change hands at these fights," Schlueter said. "We often don't know what we are dealing with. It varies, and the population and frequency of fights change with scrutiny." Video provides little fodder to charge The Lake Worth Police Department's frustrations with dogfights are detailed in an inch-thick folder with the words "dog caper" written across it in block letters. Inside the folder is the sum of two years' worth of investigations into dogfights in Lake Worth, a city south of West Palm Beach, including a number of findings at one house: A video of a caged dog, its once white muzzle coated in a thick layer of blood. Dogs with names like Nitro or Monster found chained to a front porch and peppered with dozens of scars on their muzzles and forepaws. Medical and stitching equipment for patching up wounded dogs. Dog-training devices in the back yard. The owner has not been charged. "Just because he has all of these dogs and the equipment, just because we have the video, doesn't mean we can charge him," said Lake Worth police spokeswoman Raychel Houston. "It was all circumstantial." Landlord finds bloody mess Investigating a dogfight is like working a drug operation: Officers have to set up surveillance and cultivate sources, which can take up a lot of time, Sakach said. And, like narcotics officers, dogfight investigators need to be trained how to spot dogfighting paraphernalia. "Illegal animal fighting is a whole new world to investigators," Sakach said. "It's an entirely new type of crime to the police. It even has its own vernacular." A local landlord, who asked that his name be omitted because he fears retaliation, said two of his rental properties in Boynton Beach were gutted and used as dogfighting pits. 'The carpets were saturated' He said he went by one of his homes to collect rent on Jan. 20 and found the house trashed, all of the appliances missing and a bloody mess in the living room. "There was blood smeared everywhere, bloody paw prints. The dogs must run up against the wall while they are fighting," he said. "There was blood on the walls from 3 feet up, all the way down, a perimeter of blood all the way down. The carpets were saturated." He said someone had pulled all of the doors off their hinges and laid them on their sides against the doorways to the living room. "Then they must have run the dogs inside, thrown some food in the center of the room and watched them fight," he said. A few months later, he went to his other house in Boynton Beach to collect rent and found a similar scene of gutted rooms and bloody walls. "I'm disgusted with all of this," he said. "I've cleaned and boarded them up. I'm getting out of the [rental] business." Street fighting most prevalent There are three levels of dogfighting, Sakach says. Professional dogfighters typically travel the country and the world, fighting and breeding dogs for profit. Hobbyists may have a handful of dogs they breed and follow the rules of a refereed dogfight, but they usually stay at the local level. Street fighters fight all breeds of dogs and don't typically keep track of a dog's record or bloodlines. "The numbers I think we are seeing at the street level is especially alarming," Sakach said. "All you have to do is look around and you will see the dogs being walked. You may even see a street fight." 'One had its ear ripped off' Once a dog is too injured to fight, the street fighters dump it or kill it, Sakach says. "You can go to shelters across the country and see huge numbers of pit bulls," he said. "These are the dogs picked up by animal control that have been fought until they have been used up and then discarded." DiPace said animal control officers often find dogs with fight injuries wandering the streets. "We started seeing a lot of injured strays, and it was obvious that they had been fought," she said. "One had its ear ripped off." It's the street fighters who often take to stealing dogs to fight, or to use as bait, he said. Pet swiped twice to fight That's what police say happened to Shack in Boynton Beach and what Jeanne Martin says happened to her pit bull in West Palm Beach. Her husband returned to their home in December to find their front gate open and their two pit bulls, Bunny and Horse, gone. West Palm Beach police found one of the dogs the next day in the wake of a dogfight they broke up. Horse stood in the rain, bloody and listless. Martin said her husband didn't recognize the dog at first. About a week later, someone returned Bunny, unharmed, for a reward. Martin said she spent weeks nursing Horse back to health, hand-feeding him stew and trying to settle his nervous shaking. In February, he was stolen again. And once more, he was returned bloody and beaten, the apparent victim of a one-sided dogfight. Copyright ©
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