Axel was 18 months old, a yellow Labrador retriever who had been with Sharon McGein's family since he was a puppy. He was scheduled to become a therapy dog. On Thursday, Nov. 8, 2012, in Charles City County, Virginia, he was shot in the face by a Charles City County animal control officer and died shortly afterward, WTVR/CBS 6 Richmond reported.

The officer had come to the property over a neighbor's complaint. The neighbor told CBS 6 that Axel chased her 17-year-old son home from school and then tried to bite him. According to the complaint on file cited by the station, the officer arrived at McGein's property roughly 20 minutes later, accompanied by the teenager. The boy identified Axel. A short time after that, McGein said, the officer shot the dog in the face three times.

The accounts of what happened in those moments do not agree. The officer said he fired because Axel charged at him, according to CBS 6. McGein said the dog was provoked, and described what she said the officer told her daughter: "He told my daughter he stomped at the dog, and the dog went back 10-foot, turned around and barked at him." The station reported both versions and did not resolve them. Neither has been tested in any proceeding that has been publicly reported.

Only one news organisation is known to have reported this shooting. WTVR/CBS 6 Richmond covered it on Nov. 8, 2012; no independent account from a second newsroom, and no court record, could be located. For that reason the officer is not named here, and every contested detail above rests on the station's reporting and on the people it quoted. What the record contains is what one local station documented on the day.

That record does include something unusual. Charles City County Sheriff's Captain Jayson Crawley wrote to McGein's daughter about the incident — in an email he said he sent as a private citizen and not as a county employee. "I am tired of seeing the unprofessional and lack of supervision in which he has shown ever since I have known him," Crawley wrote, according to CBS 6. A supervisory complaint of that kind, surfacing publicly the same day a dog was killed, is ordinarily the sort of thing an internal file absorbs and the public never sees.

County Administrator Zach Trogdan told the station that residents had asked him how a yellow lab could have become aggressive, and that he and the Virginia State Police were looking into the allegations. "Losing a pet like that, I understand, but at the same time every person deserves due process in figuring out what happened," Trogdan said.

McGein said she wanted to file charges. None were reported filed. No lawsuit was reported. No settlement or judgment was reported. Neither the county review nor the Virginia State Police inquiry announced in the CBS 6 story produced any publicly reported finding, and no discipline was reported. There is no national requirement that any agency record when an animal control officer or police officer shoots a dog, and no requirement that the outcome of a review like this one ever be published. Fourteen years on, the last thing the public record says about Axel's death is that two agencies said they were looking into it.