A Deputy Went to the Wrong Address, Opened the Gate, and Shot Magic

Magic was two years old, a pit bull, and on August 16, 2017, she was exactly where she was supposed to be: inside the fence at Michael Morgan's home in Wichita, Kansas. The gate was closed. Warning signs were posted. Everything about the property announced that a dog lived there.

The Sedgwick County sheriff's deputy who arrived that day was not supposed to be there. She had come to deliver a protection order, and she was at the wrong address.

The deputy opened the gate anyway. She walked past the warning signs and into the fenced yard, and when Magic rushed toward her, she shot the dog.

Magic survived the bullet. What she could not survive was the bill. The surgery that might have saved her cost more than Michael Morgan could pay, and so he was left to make the decision the deputy's mistake had priced for him: Magic was euthanized because of her injuries.

It is worth being precise about the sequence. Magic never left her own yard. The stranger came through the closed gate, past the posted warnings, carrying paperwork addressed to a different household — and when the dog rushed toward the person who had just opened her gate, that was treated as grounds to shoot her.

The Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office reviewed the shooting and ruled its deputy's use of force appropriate. Consider what that single word is being asked to cover: the wrong address, the opened gate, the ignored warning signs, the shot fired at a dog inside her own fence. All of it, appropriate.

The deputy was not publicly named. No discipline was reported. No payment for the surgery Morgan could not afford appears anywhere in the record.

Wrong-address shootings are among the starkest cases this archive documents, because they strip away every argument built on where the dog was or what the dog was doing: the errors all belong to the person holding the gun. And because no national requirement compels any law-enforcement agency to report when its officers shoot a dog — at the right address or the wrong one — no one can say how often it happens.

Here, then, is the complete public accounting. The sheriff's office ruled the use of force appropriate. No discipline was reported. The mistake cost the county nothing at all. It cost Michael Morgan his dog.