The call that brought Jonesboro, Arkansas, police to Leigh Drive on April 28, 2024, was an ugly one: three dogs had mauled a pony and a ram. Officers came out to investigate the attack on the livestock.
In the course of that investigation, one officer found a black dog. It was not attacking anything. It was hiding, tucked inside a corrugated drainage pipe.
What happened at that pipe comes to the public entirely from the police. Police said the dog growled and advanced on the officer in the tunnel. The officer fired three rounds, killing it.
There were, as far as the available reporting shows, no other witnesses to the moment. The only account of the dog's final movements — the growl, the advance — is the account of the department whose officer fired. That account may be accurate. But it is unverifiable, and it is the entire official explanation for why a hiding animal ended up dead.
The record leaves the most basic questions open. The dog's name, if it had one, was never reported; neither was its breed — it enters and leaves the record as "a black dog." Whether it was one of the three dogs involved in the mauling, the available account does not say; it says only that the officer found it hiding during the investigation. And the officer who fired has not been publicly named by the Jonesboro Police Department.
None of this diminishes the seriousness of what brought officers to Leigh Drive. A mauling that leaves a pony and a ram savaged is a real emergency, and responding to it was the department's job. But responding to an attack is not the same as accounting for a killing that happened along the way. An officer fired three rounds at a dog hiding in a drainage pipe, and the entire public explanation is a sentence sourced to his own department.
No review of the shooting has been reported. No findings. No discipline. The department's account appeared in local news two days after the shooting, and after that, as far as the public record shows, nothing further was ever reported.