Milo was ten years old — a German Shepherd, and a service dog. On November 15, 2024, he was on a leash in Jacksonville's Riverside neighborhood when a confrontation between two women turned heated, and Officer Milan Jones of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office moved in to break it up.
In the middle of that intervention, the leashed dog bit the officer. Jones fired three shots.
Two of them hit Milo. A ricochet struck his owner, Jaimie Phillips — a Marine veteran — in the leg.
That is the arithmetic of three rounds fired at a leashed dog during a neighborhood dispute: a ten-year-old service animal shot twice, and the veteran he served wounded by a ricochet from a police officer's gun. Milo survived, after surgery. His owner has said he has "a lot of healing ahead of him."
The bite is not in dispute; it is how the shooting began. What the case turns on is everything that followed — three shots, in a city neighborhood, at a dog on a leash, with gunfire that did not stop at the dog. Whatever threat a leashed service animal posed, the response to it put a ricochet in a human being's leg. That is the standing hazard in every one of these shootings: a police bullet fired at a dog does not always end its travel in the dog, and no national rule requires departments to account for where those rounds go.
What has the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office done about any of this? On the public record: nothing. No discipline for Officer Jones has been reported. No departmental finding has been reported.
The accountability effort, such as it is, belongs entirely to the person who was shot. Phillips announced plans to sue the sheriff's office and sought the full body-camera footage — footage the record indicates the owner was still seeking, not holding. If there is ever a price paid for the three shots — for Milo's two wounds, for the ricochet in Phillips' leg — it will be because a wounded Marine veteran decided to go to court and demand it. The department, as far as the public record shows, has imposed no discipline at all.