He Fired at Least 16 Shots at Two Stray Dogs — Outside His Own Jurisdiction.

It was around 3 a.m. on April 23, 2026, and Richard C. McCormick, an officer with the Thiensville Police Department, was in Mequon, Wisconsin — outside his own jurisdiction — when two stray pit bulls came bounding toward his squad car.

He fired at least 16 shots.

Body-camera footage captured the shooting. It shows McCormick continuing to fire after one of the dogs collapsed — and then firing once more, at close range, to finish it.

The second dog fled into the dark, wounded. It survived on its own, carrying that injury, for 17 days before it was recovered. The survivor was later given a name: Ranger.

Strip the encounter down to what the record documents and it is this: two loose dogs with no owner identified, an officer operating beyond the boundaries of his own department's authority at three in the morning, and at least sixteen rounds fired — the last of them, at close range, into an animal that was already down.

Because the dogs were strays, there is no owner in the record to demand answers, and no household with an obvious path to a lawsuit. Whatever accountability arrives here will have to come from institutions: the department that employed McCormick, and the county prosecutors who took up the question afterward.

What happened afterward

McCormick resigned from the Thiensville Police Department while an internal investigation was underway. Whatever that investigation might have concluded about his conduct, and whatever discipline it might have produced, his resignation came first. No discipline was ever reported.

The Ozaukee County District Attorney's Office opened a criminal review of the shooting. As of the reporting, that review is the full extent of the legal consequence on record — a review, not a charge.

A resignation is not a finding, and a review is not a prosecution. As the record stands, the only documented consequence Richard C. McCormick has faced for firing at least sixteen shots at two stray dogs — one killed with a final close-range shot, the other left wounded and missing for 17 days — is the loss of a job he gave up himself.