Key Takeaways
- A neighbor shot a dog after four dogs escaped a yard in Norfolk, raising legal questions about negligence and justification.
- The dog’s owner was home and heard gunshots, finding one dog dead and three missing.
- The neighbor disputed the necessity of the shooting, citing ongoing complaints about the barking dogs.
- The Commonwealth’s Attorney emphasized that carelessness in dog ownership can lead to criminal liability, similar to parental responsibility.
- Legal justification for using deadly force hinges on immediate danger to a person, regardless of whether the threat is a dog or human.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
NORFOLK, VA — A neighbor shot and killed a dog after four dogs got out of a yard in Norfolk, and the city’s top prosecutor says a review of an incident like this cuts in two directions at once: whether the owner was criminally negligent, and whether the person who pulled the trigger was legally justified.
The account of the shooting and the reaction from both sides of the fence comes from a television report, as reported by 13 News Now.
In a social media comment described in that report, a woman said she was attacked and bitten while walking down the street.
The owner of the dogs said she was home when it happened. She was still putting her shoes on when she heard what she described as a bunch of gunshots. She ran outside. One of her dogs was dead, and the other three were gone.
Her next door neighbor disputes that the shooting was necessary and said the man who fired had long-running complaints about the animals. “I know he doesn’t care for them,” she said, describing him as bothered by the dogs barking.
That complaint history is not the legal question. Nobody gets to shoot a dog because it barks, and nobody loses the right to defend himself because he has been annoyed by an animal in the past. What matters is what those dogs were doing in the seconds before the shots, and the reporting does not describe it.
Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi said he cannot comment on this case specifically, but he laid out how his office looks at this category of incident. A dog owner whose carelessness rises to a certain level and results in injury can face criminal liability, he said, comparing it to the way the law treats parents. “Accidents happen, but if your level of carelessness rises to a certain point, you wind up exposing yourself to criminal liability.”
The same review, he said, examines the person who fired. Where there is a risk of death or serious bodily injury, “then another person is entitled to use deadly force to protect themselves or to protect other people.”
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That is the standard, and it does not soften because the threat has four legs instead of two. A loose, aggressive dog can absolutely put a person at risk of serious bodily injury, and if you carry, an animal attack is one of the more realistic scenarios you may face on a sidewalk in your own neighborhood. The justification still rests on the danger to a human being in that moment, not on frustration with a neighbor and not on what is happening to anyone’s yard or belongings.
Nothing in the reporting identifies the man who fired, and no charging decision has been announced against him or against the owner of the dogs.
