A Deputy Killed Big Boy. Then an Investigator Ordered His Owner to Decapitate Him.

Big Boy was a pit bull mix. Joe Goodwin was his owner. In December 2017, a deputy from the Crawford County Sheriff's Office in Georgia responded to a report that the dog had bitten people — and by the end of the encounter, Goodwin had not only lost his dog. He had been made to mutilate him.

The shooting itself is thinly documented. The deputy shot and killed Big Boy when, per the reporting, the dog allegedly lunged. The record preserves the lunge only as an allegation, and no other account of Big Boy's final moments appears.

What followed is the reason this case stands out. Investigator James Hollis told Goodwin that the dog had to be decapitated on the scene for rabies testing — and threatened Goodwin with jail unless Goodwin did it himself.

Goodwin complied. Standing over the body of his own dog, under threat of a cell, he cut off Big Boy's head.

Nothing in the record explains why that task fell to the grieving owner rather than to any official actor — animal control, a veterinarian, the deputies themselves. What the record establishes is the mechanism: a law-enforcement officer used the threat of jail to make a man decapitate his own dog, and the man obeyed.

The aftermath, for once, was not total silence — but listen to what it amounted to. The sheriff's office placed Hollis on administrative leave and opened an investigation into both the shooting and the rabies-testing order. That is where the public record stops. Whether the investigation found misconduct, whether Hollis returned to duty, whether anyone was disciplined, charged, or cleared — none of it was reported. The deputy who actually fired was never publicly named, and no consequence for the shooting itself was ever reported at all.

Administrative leave is not accountability; it is a pause. An investigation is not a finding; it is a promise, and the record does not show whether this one was kept.

So the ledger reads: one dog shot dead on the strength of an alleged lunge. One owner forced to decapitate him under threat of jail. One investigator placed on leave, outcome unreported. One deputy, unnamed, with no consequence reported. Joe Goodwin was made to carry out the worst of it with his own hands. As far as the public record shows, no one else has carried anything.