By Michael Benavides
Staff Writer
JACKSON – An attack by two dogs described as pit bulls caused the death of a 7-year-old Yorkshire Terrier and resulted in summonses being issued to a Jackson resident who owns a pair of pit bulls.
According to the Jackson Police Department, Officer Christopher Kelly responded to a home on Maxim Court to speak with Taron Conover, the owner of the dog that was attacked, on Dec. 31.
Maxim Court is in a residential development off Bennetts Mills Road.
According to the police report, “(Conover) states approximately 11:30 a.m., two pit bulls came into his yard and fatally attacked his family dog, Sasha. The pit bulls are described as normal build for that breed, one was black and white, and the other was all black. This incident occurred at the rear of his residence in which the pit bulls entered his property through a wooded area.
“(Conover) added that he heard a commotion at the time of the incident, including barking and yelping. By the time (he) went to see what occurred, the pit bulls ran back into the wooded area,” according to the police report.
At 12:23 p.m., Police Officers John Roth and Michael Grochowski responded to assist Kelly at the Conover home. The officers searched the wooded area and the surrounding neighborhood for an hour, but could not locate the dogs Conover had described, according to the police report.
At 4:35 p.m., Roth and Grochowski received information from an off-duty police officer pertaining to a message about two missing pit bulls that had been posted on Facebook, according to the police report.
The information was posted on the Jackson, N.J., Residents page by Emily Ingram and was time-stamped four hours earlier. The message included a photograph of two pit bulls sitting on a dining room floor. One dog was black and the second dog was black and white. There was a message above the photograph which said, “Rex and Daisy just escaped; very friendly; please call me,” according to the police report.
Police officers subsequently returned to the Conover home and showed Conover’s wife, Angel, a color photo of the dogs that had been posted on Facebook by Ingram. Police said Conover identified those dogs as the animals that had killed Sasha.
On Jan. 13, Ingram said, “It was not my dogs” that killed Sasha. She said her property has a fence and it also has land behind the fence that belongs to her.
“My dogs left the fenced portion of my property at 11:36 a.m. They got stuck in shrubbery. My daughter brought them inside the house seven minutes later. I never lost sight of my dogs. I am a responsible owner. They would never attack another dog. It was 100 percent not my dogs,” she said.
Jackson Police Capt. Steven Laskiewicz said Ingram was issued four summonses in the aftermath of the incident. Two summonses were issued for each of her dogs. The summonses cited dogs running at large and failure to provide control.
Ingram said no court date has been set to hear the summonses.
A telephone call to Jackson’s animal control officer seeking comment about the dog attack was referred to Ken Pieslak, who is Jackson’s code compliance supervisor. Pieslak said the police department handled the incident because it occurred over the weekend of Dec. 31, a holiday weekend.
Tri-Town News Managing Editor Mark Rosman contributed to this article.
