Sent to Check on a Woman, He Fired at Her Dog — and Killed Her

Margarita "Maggie" Brooks was lying in a grassy area in Arlington, Texas, on August 1, 2019, and her dog was with her. Police were dispatched for a welfare check — the category of call that exists, in principle, to make sure a person is safe. Officer Ravinder "Ravi" Singh of the Arlington Police Department answered it.

The dog was unrestrained. Its breed was never reported; in the record of this case it is simply Brooks' dog, the animal keeping her company in the grass. As Singh carried out the check, the dog approached him.

Singh fired three shots at it.

Every one of them missed the dog. Maggie Brooks was struck. She died at a hospital — killed by gunfire aimed at her own dog, during a call placed for her own welfare. The dog Singh perceived as the threat was never hit at all.

It is worth sitting with the mechanics. An officer dispatched to make sure a woman on the ground was all right answered her approaching dog with three rounds — and the person those rounds found was the woman he had been sent to help. The dog was unharmed. The woman he came to help was dead.

What happened to Officer Singh

Singh resigned from the Arlington Police Department in 2019, the same year as the shooting. In 2020, he was indicted — and the charge itself measured the stakes: not a firearms violation, not animal cruelty, but criminally negligent homicide. A human being had died. According to later coverage of the case, Singh was found not guilty at trial.

The acquittal closed the criminal ledger. What remained was the civil one: Brooks' family filed a federal wrongful-death lawsuit, a proceeding they had to initiate themselves, seeking through litigation the accounting the criminal process did not deliver.

The full record of consequences, then: a resignation, an indictment that ended in acquittal, and a wrongful-death suit her family had to bring on their own. Maggie Brooks was the person the system was sent to protect that day. Three shots aimed at her dog later, she was dead — and the criminal-justice system's final word on the man who fired them was not guilty.