A Dog Was Found Shot Dead at a Virginia Archery Range. A Federal Officer Was Charged.

On a Saturday in July 2017, someone at the Archery Club Range in Fountainhead Regional Park heard what NBC4 Washington described as a pop. About 30 minutes later, the same witness found a German-shepherd mix lying dead in the park in Fairfax Station, Virginia, with a massive head wound, and called Animal Control.

The dog had a name, though it took a necropsy to find it. Fairfax County Animal Services recovered a microchip from the body, and the chip identified him as Amatah. According to NBC4 Washington, the microchip records also carried a small history: Amatah had been found running loose several times and brought to the animal shelter, where his owner had come to retrieve him.

That record is what turned a dead dog in a park into a criminal case. Animal services traced the chip to its registered owner, an officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security, the station reported. When investigators contacted the dog's veterinary clinic, they learned the owner had called in August 2017 to report that his pet had died at home — a detail NBC4 attributed to a search warrant affidavit.

Fairfax County police used a search warrant to seize the officer's duty weapon, the station reported, but ballistics tests on it were inconclusive. In March 2018 the officer came to police headquarters for a voluntary interview. "There he admitted to shooting the canine at Northern Virginia Archery Range," an investigator wrote in court records quoted by NBC4. The officer told investigators he owned two Heckler & Koch pistols — his duty weapon and an older duty weapon he had bought when his agency issued him a new service gun — and said he did not remember which one he used, according to the station. He turned over the second pistol for testing and was charged days later. Reached by phone, he told NBC4 he could not speak at the time.

Only NBC4 Washington appears to have reported this case; no independent account of the incident was located, and everything above rests on that single newsroom's reporting and the police and court records it describes.

What happened to Amatah

Amatah's body was left at the range. The charges filed by Fairfax County police reflect that: felony cruelty to animals, unlawful discharge of a weapon, and littering. "That this should happen to any animal is concerning, and that's why we took the investigation so seriously," Capt. Paul Norton, the animal services commander, told the station. A regular park visitor, Mark Smith, told NBC4 what worried him about a gunshot at a public archery range: "If it would have missed, it could have been a human."

The charges are accusations, not findings, and NBC4's report does not record how the case was resolved. Customs and Border Protection said it does not tolerate any actions by its employees that would tarnish the agency's reputation and that it was fully cooperating with Fairfax County police. The station reported it was not immediately clear whether the officer still worked for the agency — and CBP, a federal agency, is under no obligation to say. No federal reporting requirement tracks shootings like this one, and but for a microchip and an eight-month county investigation, Amatah would have stayed an anonymous body in a park.