It Mauled a Woman to Death Outside Her Home. Maryland Troopers Shot It at the Scene.

The call that brought Maryland State Police to Huntingtown in June 2018 was not a barking complaint or a loose-dog report. It was a report of a dog attack, and by the time a trooper arrived, the attack had already done its worst. Jenna Rae Sutphin, 28 years old, had been mauled by a dog outside her own home in the Calvert County community. She died of her injuries that night.

The dog was a Dogo, a large mastiff-type breed. Its name was never reported. The record does not say who owned it, where it came from, or why it attacked.

According to the account reported by CBS Baltimore, the trooper found the Dogo at the scene. When the dog moved aggressively toward him, he shot it. That first round did not kill the animal. Troopers later shot it fatally near the scene — two shots in all, the second one fatal.

There is no competing account in the record. No owner came forward to dispute the trooper's description of a dog moving aggressively toward him. No video surfaced to contradict it. Not every police shooting of a dog is contested, and this one was not: the animal the trooper confronted had inflicted injuries that would kill a woman before the night was over. He was sent to the scene of a mauling and met the dog responsible for it.

This site documents government agents shooting dogs, and it documents this incident the same way it documents every other one — with the facts the record contains, wherever they point.

The accounting

Nothing was reported to have happened to the trooper, and nothing in the record suggests anything should have. No complaint was reported. No internal review was made public. No lawsuit was reported. The trooper was not publicly named.

The investigation that followed was not into the shooting at all. It was into the mauling — a fatal dog attack, investigated as what it was. In the official record, the rounds fired by state troopers are a footnote to the death of Jenna Rae Sutphin.

That is the entire public accounting of the incident, and in this case it reads as complete. A woman was killed outside her own home. The dog that killed her was shot dead by the officers who answered the call. The file closed on the human victim, which is where it belonged.