The Famous Tioga Middle School Dog Incident

I had a very interesting experience this past week at school. On Wednesday, I walked to the front of the school as I always do before the end of the day to see if there were any unsavory characters at the front of the school, which there often is. I was startled to see 2 pit bull dogs walking towards me at the front gate. I immediately became nervous that the two dogs would walk onto the campus and terrorize the students inside, about two minutes out from being released for the day, so I jumped in front of them, trying to get them to walk a different direction, and they decided that they would walk onto a open school bus. The bus driver, waiting and sleeping in the third row of the bus, was a little shocked to see these dogs walk on his bus and let out a few explicatives. Almost immediately, this guy drove up and informed me that the dogs had just chased this woman over the fence down the road and left her scraped and bloody. Concerned, we immediately called 911 and the SPCA. I spent the next minute trying to get the dogs out of the bus, but they became more and more aggressive. The police showed up almost immediately, but had no more luck then I in getting the dogs to leave the bus. I noticed that the bell was about to ring, so I locked the front gate, ran onto campus and re-directed the students to alternative exit.

So these two dogs were holed up on the bus and there was now many people trying to see what was happening. While there were no students allowed to come to close proximity of the dogs, there were many neighborhood people and others trying to see what was going on. As I was trying to keep people on the other side of the road, standing right in front of the bus, a bizarre and somewhat surreal scene opened in front of me as the the two dogs came charging out of the bus going for the bus driver standing in by the closed front gate. The bus driver jumped on top of the fence as the dogs were trying to go for his legs, then both dogs then turned on the cop. The officer drew his gun as he was backing away from the oncoming dogs and shot one below the head while he stumbled backwards and fell on his butt. The next dog came charging at the officer who was sitting on the ground and the officer proceeded to shoot him as well. This all unfolded a few feet in front of me. Both dogs slumped down to the ground and began bleeding profusely. To say the least, quite a few people, parents and students, witnessed the whole event. Thank heavens no one was hurt. After the whole police investigation took place and the news media came out and did their thing, my first thought was I wonder what the re-procutions of a police officer firing off his gun at the front of my school during release time will be. Luckily, there has been no complaints or lawsuits...yet. See the media story at:

http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=local&id=5490126