Police Came About a Parked Boat. They Entered the Yard and Shot Duke in the Head.

Duke was eleven years old, a Catahoula hound mix, a senior dog with his own door into the Brooks family's fenced yard in Ocoee, Florida. In July 2017 he used it — came out through the dog door into his own yard — and an Ocoee police officer shot him in the head.

The officers were not there for the Brooks family. They were not there on any emergency at all. They were conducting an area check concerning a boat parked across the street, and in the course of checking on someone else's boat, they entered the family's fenced yard. They had no permission to be in it.

The officer who fired said afterward that he feared a bite. That is the only justification in the record, and the sequence around it is stark: officers inside a fenced yard they had not been invited into, an old dog coming through his own door into his own yard, a shot to the head.

Then came the detail that turns a family's loss into an institutional problem: the initial police report omitted the shooting. An officer had entered a fenced residential yard without permission, discharged his weapon, and killed a family's dog — and the paperwork, as first written, recorded none of it. Whatever one makes of a split-second fear of a bite, a report is not written in a split second. A report that leaves out the gunshot is how an incident like Duke's death disappears: no record, no review, nothing for anyone tracking a pattern to count.

The Brooks family refused to let it disappear. They launched a "Justice for Duke" petition seeking policy changes, and they considered legal action.

The department's response to its officer was this: he was placed on administrative leave, briefly, and then returned to duty. That is the entire disciplinary record — a pause, then reinstatement. No other consequence was reported for the officer who entered a yard uninvited during a check on a parked boat, shot an eleven-year-old dog in the head, and whose shooting the first version of the police report did not mention. Duke came out through his dog door into his own yard. What was in that yard was a police officer with no permission to be there — and, for the officer, nothing to answer for in the end beyond a brief leave.