The call that came in to the Sturgeon, Missouri, police on May 19, 2024, described an injured animal behaving strangely. What Officer Myron Woodson found when he responded was Teddy: a Shih Tzu mix, thirteen pounds, blind and deaf.
For about three minutes, Woodson tried to snare the small dog. The snare did not end the encounter. His gun did: he shot Teddy twice at close range.
The city's first explanation invoked rabies — officials initially cited concerns about the disease. Woodson's own body camera preserved another piece of context: it captured him saying that the town had no animal control. A thirteen-pound dog that could neither see nor hear the man pursuing it was killed in a town that, by its own officer's recorded words, had no animal control to send instead.
What followed is what almost never follows.
Woodson was placed on paid leave and, in October 2024, resigned. Teddy's owner filed a federal lawsuit. In November 2025, the city and its former officer agreed to settle that suit for $500,000. The mayor of Sturgeon resigned as well. And the town ultimately dissolved its police department altogether, contracting with the Boone County Sheriff for law enforcement.
It is worth being precise about what accountability looked like even here, in one of the rare cases where consequences actually arrived. No criminal charges were reported. Woodson was not fired; he resigned, from paid leave, months after the shooting. The half-million-dollar settlement was agreed to by the city as well as the ex-officer — a public price attached to a roughly three-minute encounter with a thirteen-pound dog. And the ultimate institutional consequence was not the reform of the department but its end: Sturgeon no longer has a police force of its own to hold accountable.
Everything on that list — the resignation, the second resignation, the $500,000, the dissolution of the department itself — took a federal lawsuit and roughly eighteen months to extract, from the shooting in May 2024 to the settlement announced in November 2025. That is what accountability costs to obtain, even when it comes. Teddy was blind, deaf, and thirteen pounds. The officer who answered the call spent about three minutes with a snare, and then fired twice.