On August 21, 2024, a Davenport, Iowa, police officer at a family's home gave the neighborhood boys an instruction: put the dog away.
The dog was Myst. The boys complied, and Myst was being led inside.
What happened next is contested in the way these cases are always contested — the police account on one side, the video on the other. Police said that as Myst was being led in, the dog bolted toward the officer, growling. The officer fired three shots.
Home video showed where the dog went after the gunfire: back toward the house. Myst died near the back porch, in front of screaming children.
Assemble the sequence from both sources. An officer asked for the dog to be contained. The dog was in the act of being contained. Three shots were fired. And a family's dog died at its own back door while the children who lived there screamed. The part that rests entirely on the police account is the middle — the bolt, the growl, the threat. What the video showed was a dog running home to die.
The Davenport Police Department opened an investigation. That is the last procedural fact in the public record: an investigation with no publicly reported findings, no reported discipline, and an officer who has never been publicly named. Whether the department reviewed the home video, whether it credited the account of the bolt and the growl, whether anyone was found at fault — none of it has been made public.
There is one more documented scene, and it belongs at the end, because it is the accountability record in miniature. Myst's owner went to a Davenport city council meeting to demand answers about why the dog was killed. The owner was escorted out.
That is where the matter stands: three shots from an unnamed officer, an investigation with no public conclusion, no discipline reported — and the one person who pressed the question in a public forum removed from the room. In Davenport, the record shows exactly one person facing consequences over the killing of Myst, and it is the person who owned the dog.