A Wrong-Address Compliance Check Ended With Clide Shot in the Head in His Own Yard

Clide was three years old, a terrier mix, and on November 9, 2020, he was in his own yard in Greenbrier, Arkansas.

The armed stranger who entered that yard was James Freeman, an investigator with the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office, out conducting a sex-offender compliance check. The address he wanted was somewhere else. Freeman had gone to the wrong house.

In the yard of that wrong house, Freeman shot the family's dog in the head.

The homeowner said Clide was only barking — not attacking. No account from the sheriff's office describing the dog's behavior differently appears in the record. What appears instead is what the office did about its investigator.

What the sheriff's office did

It opened an internal investigation. Freeman remained on duty while it ran. And when it was done, the sheriff announced the conclusion: no policies were violated.

Take that finding at face value, because it is the most damning sentence in the record. An investigator went to the wrong address and shot a family's three-year-old terrier mix in the head in its own yard, and the agency that reviewed the incident determined that every part of it was consistent with Faulkner County policy. If nothing about that day broke a rule, the indictment falls on the rules.

The county had reason to know better. In 2019, the year before Clide was killed, another Faulkner County deputy shot a dog in a similar incident — and that deputy was fired and charged. The office had already demonstrated, once, that it knew how to treat one of these shootings as misconduct. After Clide, it did not repeat the lesson: no policy changes were made.

So the accountability ledger reads like this. An internal investigation that ended by clearing the office's own investigator. An investigator who never left duty. A sheriff who declared the policies intact. And a department that had seen a similar shooting the year before, fired and charged the deputy responsible, and still changed nothing that might have kept Freeman from Clide's yard. The family was left with a dead three-year-old dog, shot in the head where he lived, and an official finding that, as far as Faulkner County is concerned, this is the system working as written.