She Was Wagging Her Tail When the Officer Fired. A Jury Awarded Her Family $333,000.

In February 2009, Chicago police arrived at a South Side apartment building to execute a narcotics search warrant. Thomas Russell III was 18 years old. His brother Darren was 16. The brothers said they heard officers in the hallway and opened the door when someone said "police," according to a statement from the family's attorney, Amanda Antholt, reported by NBC Chicago. Officers pointed guns at the two teenagers and handcuffed them.

Also in the apartment was Lady, the family's 9-year-old black Labrador retriever. The brothers asked the officers to let them secure her first. FindLaw's legal blog, summarizing Chicago Tribune reporting on the later criminal trial, reported that Thomas Russell stood with his hands in the air and asked if he could lock the dog up before the officers came in, and that the officers said no.

Lady walked into the room. "Lady, a black Labrador retriever, was wagging her tail when she ran up to a Chicago cop who shotgunned her as he executed a search warrant on a South Side apartment in 2009," the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 2018. FindLaw described the same moment from the trial record: the dog came in calmly, wagging her tail, and an officer shot her.

Thomas Russell was arrested and charged with obstructing authorized service of criminal process. At his criminal trial, Antholt said, the officers themselves testified that he had never blocked their entry and that he had been handcuffed only for safety reasons. He was found not guilty.

The family then sued, alleging false arrest, excessive force and illegal seizure in the killing of the dog. In August 2011, a Chicago jury returned a verdict for them. FindLaw reported the family of Darren and Thomas Russell was awarded $243,000 over the raid and the shooting, and Thomas Russell a further $90,000 for the false arrest — $333,000 in all. Antholt gave NBC Chicago the breakdown: $175,000 to Thomas, $85,000 to Darren, $35,000 to each of their parents, plus $2,000 in punitive damages against the officer who shot Lady and $1,000 against his supervisor.

A jury verdict is a finding, not a negotiated payment: the jurors decided the case against the defendants. It did not, so far as the sources report, cost anyone a job. Neither the Sun-Times nor NBC Chicago named the officer who fired; only FindLaw did, relaying Tribune reporting that could not be retrieved, and a name resting on a single outlet is not one this record will publish.

"I can see them shooting a dog that is foaming at the mouth or charging them — a guard dog," Thomas Russell told the Sun-Times seven years later. "But they took a 9-year-old family member from us, our pet."

The Sun-Times obtained city records showing that Chicago police shot or shot at 700 dogs between 2008 and 2018, with officers afterward saying they feared for their own safety or others'. Not one of those shootings, the paper found, produced so much as a recommendation of discipline against an officer — not even in the cases where the courts found the dogs were wrongly killed and the city was ordered to pay. Before 2011, the department required an officer who killed a dog to fill out a card noting that a firearm had been used on an animal. Lady's death cost the public $333,000. No discipline was reported.