Chico was ten months old — still a puppy — a pit bull who belonged to Marissa Gilliland of Greenville, South Carolina. The deputies who killed him in July 2017 had no business with him, with Gilliland, or with their home at all: they were serving a search warrant at a neighbor's house.
Chico approached them. On that much, everyone agrees. What the approach looked like depends entirely on who describes it.
The Greenville County Sheriff's Office said the dog came at a deputy aggressively, and that he was unrestrained. Marissa Gilliland said her puppy approached in a friendly manner — and that the deputies shot him again as he fled.
The deputies fired four to six rounds at a ten-month-old dog. And inside the owner's account sits the detail hardest to reconcile with any theory of self-defense: shot again as he fled. If Gilliland's account is right, at least one round struck Chico while he was moving away from the deputies, not toward them — a puppy running from the first bullets when another found him. The sheriff's office account and the owner's cannot both be accurate, and nothing in the record — no video, no court finding — resolves them. Both stand, attributed, as the whole of what is known.
What is beyond dispute is the review that followed, because there was barely one to dispute. The Greenville County Sheriff's Office examined the force its own deputies had used and deemed it justified. The review produced no released findings beyond that conclusion, no explanation of the shot count, and no answer to the owner's account that Chico was shot as he fled.
Nothing else was reported. No discipline. No charges. No named deputy — the officers involved were never publicly identified. Marissa Gilliland's puppy was ten months old, was suspected of nothing, and lived at an address named in no warrant, and he was shot four to six times during the search of somebody else's house. The agency that fired the shots was also the agency that judged them, and it found in its own favor. The public record of consequence ends with the sheriff's office's verdict on itself: justified.