Angelo was three years old, an American Staffordshire terrier, and on October 22, 2016, he was loose. He and a second dog had gotten out of Valeria Rios's backyard in Aurora, Colorado, and residents did what residents do: they called 911 to report pit bulls running loose near an apartment complex. It was the kind of call that ends, most days, with a dog cornered, leashed, and walked home.
This one ended with an Aurora police officer shooting Angelo in the face.
The officer's explanation was captured on his own body camera: the dog, he said, "came right at me." That is the police account. Valeria Rios watched the same footage and came away disputing it — after viewing the video, she did not accept that her dog had been aggressive.
The body camera was supposed to settle questions exactly like this one. Instead, the footage produced two irreconcilable readings — the officer's, delivered in the moment, and the owner's, reached after watching what the camera saw — and the department holding the video declined to referee between them.
Angelo did not die in the street. He was euthanized because of what the bullet had done to his face.
Loose-dog calls are among the most ordinary things a police department handles, and Angelo's case shows how quickly ordinary can turn lethal when the answer to an approaching dog is a firearm. The available record does not indicate that anything short of a gun was tried.
What officialdom did afterward is worth setting down in order, because the order tells the story. The only citation reported in connection with the incident went to Valeria Rios — for keeping a vicious or aggressive dog. In the eyes of the municipal process, the offending party in this story was the dog who was shot, and the person answerable was the woman who lost him.
Asked about the shooting, the Aurora Police Department declined to comment, citing anticipated civil litigation — the posture of an institution preparing to defend itself in court rather than explain itself to the public. Whatever review the department may have conducted produced nothing the public ever saw.
So the accounting stands like this: Angelo is dead. His owner was cited. The department went silent. And for the officer who fired — never publicly named — no discipline was ever reported.