Ace was 10 years old, a goldendoodle, when Wayne State University police officers came to his Detroit neighborhood on April 28, 2023. The officers were conducting a wellness check at a property neighboring his family's home. Ace approached them.
The officer said the dog charged. He shot Ace in the face.
The bullet went through Ace's lips, cracked his teeth, and damaged his jaw. He survived.
His family described a different dog from the one in the officer's account: friendly, they said, and non-aggressive. And they said something else — that after Ace was shot, officers delayed helping the wounded animal.
The two accounts of the shooting are the familiar, irreconcilable pair. In the officer's, a charging dog left him no choice. In the family's, a friendly 10-year-old goldendoodle approached the wrong people and was shot in the face for it. The record contains nothing that settles which account describes what happened — no video, no independent finding.
It is worth noticing who did the shooting. This was not the Detroit Police Department. It was a university police force — Wayne State's campus officers, on a wellness check at a residential property — with its own chain of command, its own review process, and its own discretion about what to disclose when an officer shoots a family's pet. When a campus department wounds a neighbor's dog, there is no obvious public mechanism that forces an answer, and in this case none ever produced one.
The family did what families in these cases are left to do: they went public. They demanded accountability for the officer who shot Ace, and they demanded a policy change so that it would not happen to someone else's dog.
The record shows what those demands produced. No discipline was reported. No policy change appears anywhere in the record. A wellness check — a visit undertaken, by definition, out of concern for someone's well-being — ended with a neighbor family's 10-year-old dog shot through the face, and the institutional response to that outcome was, as far as the record shows, nothing. Ace recovered from the bullet — the cracked teeth, the damaged jaw, the wound through his lips. The family's two demands, for accountability and for change, were never answered at all.