Questions remain after police shoot and kill family dog

It was about 2 a.m. when a SWAT team swarmed the home of Ron Simpson, suspected of shooting his 22-year-old son in the leg a few hours before.

The entire scene was heard over the police radio.

“We can hear a dog barking on the inside of the house,” a Valley SWAT team officer is heard saying.

“Copy of a dog barking,” another responds.

Officers believed Simpson used a sawed off shotgun during the incident on June 10. They had information that his Federal Way house, which they were surrounding early on June 11, is a drug house.

The team got a search warrant, entered the home, determined that Simpson wasn’t there, and cleared it for detectives to come inside. In the process, they shot and killed the family pit bull, Kaman.

“We had the dog on the dog pole, but he was able to break free so we just had to shoot him,” one officer said on the radio.

“Necessary?” the commander asks.

“Yes.”

“Is it possible to lock him up in a room or something?”

“No, he’s dead.”

While police departments across the country face tremendous criticism over use of force and clashes with citizens, a smaller group of people feels it’s just as important to discuss how officers interact with pets.

Simpson’s friend, Jen Huerta, used to live at the house and helped raise Kaman. She believes the SWAT team could have done more to spare his life.

“He’d be barking at the door and I’d go, ‘Kaman!'” she remembered. “He’d get all excited and his butt would be swinging and he’d be licking me.”

In the wake of the SWAT raid, Huerta has met with friends to try and piece together what happened.

“They were able to call animal control after he died,” Huerta said. “Why not before? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Huerta doesn’t speculate about what was going on at the house or about Simpsons’s actions.

“Whatever they’re accusing him of, animals and people in the house should be safe, regardless,” she said.

At this point, Huerta has already complained to police about Kaman’s death. The commander of the SWAT team has emailed her a response, which she hasn’t read yet.

At a meeting with friends, all who loved Kaman, she pulls out her phone and reads it to the group for the first time.

“I acknowledge the emotion and sadness that you feel,” she reads.

She gets to a point in the letter where the commander explains that two roommates both told police that Kaman would bite them. This makes Jeff Spicer livid. He was present during the SWAT raid.

“Why would I say that?” he said. “I kept begging to come back in the house to get the dog and tie him to a tree! That is a complete fabrication.”

Huerta continued, “The officers used a taser to incapacitate the dog for five-second cycles so they could snare it with a pole. They were successful and began to move the dog downstairs to a different room. While the dog was being moved, it began to violently thrash and was able to slip out of the pole snare. It was able to charge one officer, but then changed direction to charge another officer.”

“He was probably so scared!” she said.

Spicer believes that if police had proper training for such situations, Kaman would not have been shot.

“As many man hours as they spend training for these kinds of situations, why can’t they put a couple hours towards training on how to deal with animals such as this?” he asked.

Valley SWAT team Commander Casey Jones was one of the people on the radio that night. He said it’s usually safer for the team to take care of such situations themselves, instead of utilizing one of the roommates to take care of the dog.

“For whatever reason, it didn’t work on this one,” Jones said. “It’s worked several times in the past. We just move the dog from one room to another.”

“Plus, when the people came out of the house originally they said, ‘Hey, that dog is gonna bite you, that dog wants to bite you,'” he said.

But the two people involved, Spicer and a woman named Randi Ross, both say that’s a complete fabrication.

“That’s the facts as I have them,” Jones said.

So why not let animal control deal with the dog?

“They would do the same thing we would,” he says.

Valley SWAT team officers come from six different police departments. Commander Jones admitted that they don’t do any training on dealing with dogs and instead rely on whatever training officers get from their respective cities. That training is not tracked.

Eric Sakach, with the national Humane Society, says hundreds of animals, mostly dogs, are killed by police every year.

“I’m not arguing that some of the dogs aren’t killed for legitimate reasons of public or officer safety but, in most cases, the dogs die needlessly,” Sakach said. “They’re victims of misunderstood behavior, a general fear of dogs, or the lack of education on non-lethal protection techniques. All of that boils down to training.”

Sakach says he knows of no case where a police officer has died from an encounter with a dog. And he says it’s impossible for a dog to break free of a catch pole if it’s used properly.

But police say Kaman did get loose and that’s why they were forced to shoot.

Catch poles use is a specific, important skill. But Sakach points to big-picture training that can help avoid conflicts before they get started.

A Department of Justice sponsored video explains dog behavior and goes over steps police can take to diffuse a situation with a dog.

Of the 10 largest police departments in the state, plus the state patrol, only three do overall training on encounters with dogs.

None of the six cities that make up Valley SWAT do this kind of training.

Sakach believes every police department in the country should require its officers to watch the video.

“They need to understand that dog shootings are highly emotional incidents that cause problems for citizens and police departments alike,” Sakah said. “So learning how to resolve [situations] in a nonlethal manner helps maintain trust in community.”

The City of Des Moines learned that lesson, as it was forced to pay at least $51,000 in the settlement of a lawsuit after police killed a beloved family dog named Rosie in 2010.

Now, Des Moines is one of the smaller cities in Washington that requires its officers to watch the DOJ video, free of charge.

Exact numbers of dogs killed in Washington state are difficult to track down. Most police departments don’t keep use-of-force lists when it’s against dogs.

Huerta says she still thinks about Kaman’s death constantly.

“He’s like my son,” Huerta said. “I cry and I miss him and I wish that I could have been there and helped him.”

She thinks the fact that he’s a pit bull made the police more wary, but she insists he was well-trained. She has pictures of him playing with little kids in a park without a leash. She clings to a video of Kaman trying to get a stick out of the water.

Now, Huerta is gathering materials and hoping to file a lawsuit against multiple police departments.

But she says she doesn’t want money, she wants change.

“..a change in procedures where animals are taken more into consideration and are not just slain in the SWAT process of trying to find a suspect,” she said. “I just want other dogs to be safe.”