Police Shot Pebbles Six Times. Her Owners Say She Was Running Away.

The call that brought Auburn, Washington, police out on May 13, 2022, was serious, and this account should say so plainly: a dog had attacked an 11-year-old girl. The child was bitten on the arm and needed stitches.

The dog was Pebbles.

What happened when the officer encountered her is disputed at the most basic level. Police said Pebbles ran toward the officer. Her owners said she was running away from the officer.

Toward or away — the two accounts describe opposite events. What is not disputed is what the officer did: shot Pebbles six times. She was so badly injured that she was euthanized.

Six shots deserve to be counted, one at a time, because the number is part of the record. Whatever threat a dog running in any direction posed, the officer's answer to it was six rounds — and the question of whether the first was fired at an approaching dog or a fleeing one has never been resolved by anyone with the authority to resolve it.

The owners said publicly that the shooting was not justified. The police account said otherwise. And there, the record simply stops.

No discipline was reported. No lawsuit was reported. No public process — internal review, prosecutor's decision, civil complaint — appears in the record at all. The dispute between "ran toward" and "ran away" was never tested against evidence in any forum. It was left as a permanent stalemate: the department's version in one press account, the family's version beside it, and a dead dog between them.

This is worth dwelling on precisely because the underlying call was legitimate. A child was hurt; she needed stitches; calling for help was the right thing to do, and responding was the right thing to do. None of that answers the question the shooting raised — whether six rounds into a dog her owners say was fleeing was a necessary response — and no one ever had to answer it. A department can be right to respond to a call and still owe the public an accounting of how the response ended. Auburn's police department, as far as the record shows, provided none.

At the start of this story, Pebbles was reported to have bitten a child. By its end, she had been shot six times and euthanized. The officer who fired was never publicly named, and as far as the public record shows, nothing happened afterward at all.