By C1 Staff
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — After her 5-year-old German Shepard chow-chow mix was killed in front of her home last week, Monica Montoya is seeking stricter policies involving animals and law enforcement shootings.
Bakersfield Now reports that a probation officer came to Montoya’s residence last Thursday, after he’d received information that a man wanted on a felony warrant resided there.
Montoya said the man knows her roommate, but she and her family don’t know him personally. She did pay him to do yard work.
She answered the door when the probation officer knocked, but then tried to close the door again once her dog got too close. Montoya says the probation officer pushed the door open, allowing her dog to run out into the yard.
Both the dog and the probation officer moved into the yard before the single shot was fired. Montoya describes the probation officer being pushed up against a fence before shooting the dog.
Montoya says that a TASER would have just as easily incapacitated the dog, but chief probation officer T.R. Merickle says it’s not that simple.
“Since AB 109, the probation department has also had to supervise people that are directly released from prison. That raises a different type of population that we’ve ever had in the past; and it’s raised that level of seriousness.”
Merickle says the officers are sent into unpredictable situations and trained to make split-second decisions.
Montoya still believes that if the probation officer had used different tactics, her dog would still be alive today.
“They have to use other tactics before they use the gun. I understand completely if [Buddy] was on top of him, that’s his life, but [Buddy] wasn’t. [The officer] could have let me grab him, he could have [used a] TASER on him,” she said. “I just wish things would change. I wish they wouldn’t be so trigger happy.”
The incident is still under investigation.