A woman was out for a jog in her Long Island neighborhood when she says two pit bull dogs ran up and attacked her. When her husband came to help, he too, became a victim.
“One dog had me by the hand, the other by the elbow,” Larry Ballereau said Thursday, 10 days after the Dix Hills attacks. “It was scary.”
Ballereau and his wife both endured bruises and cuts. But despite that, the two pit bulls responsible remain just down the block.
“Those dogs are dangerous and they can’t be on our street,” Dix Hills resident
Helen Tarnaras and her daughter, Stacie, own the two dogs. She said a visitor left a side gate open and that is how the dogs got loose.
“We don’t have vicious dogs,” Tarnaras said. “The gate was not latched properly the day before and we weren’t aware of it.”
“This was horrible what happened to my neighbors. Horrible,” her daughter said.
Apologies and explanations aren’t enough for neighbors, like Joe Campanelli. They want the dogs removed from the community, at least temporarily.
”It’s disturbing that the dogs were unprovoked, that they were loose,” Campanelli said.
A Huntington spokesperson says the town has cited the dogs owners for code violations, and a Suffolk judge will hold a hearing Friday to determine if anything further must be done with the dogs.
Both the town and Suffolk police say they have received no prior complaints about the pit bulls.
“Why would we want vicious dogs, Stacie and I? Why?” said Tarnaras.
Neighbors, however, claim the dogs also attacked a 12-year-old boy on a bicycle in July.
”I don’t care what they do with the dogs. They just can’t be on the block and it doesn’t seem like these people are responsible for these dogs,” Ballereau said.
Both the attack victims and the dogs owners will be in that Suffolk court Friday as a judge decides what, if anything, must be done with the two dogs.
0 Comments