It was a Friday evening — July 24, 2026 — on the 1200 block of West Franklin Street in Baltimore when a police officer came upon two dogs chasing two women and their pet.
One dog fled. The other, a pit bull with no collar, kept attacking. The officer tried a Taser first. It didn't work. Then he shot the dog, killing it.
That is the account reported by The Baltimore Banner, and it is nearly the whole of what is publicly known. The reporting does not say who the women were, or whether they or their pet were hurt. It does not say how many shots were fired. It does not follow the dog that fled — that animal simply leaves the record. And it could not say whose dog the pit bull was, because the answer, in the end, was nobody's: it wore no collar, and no one ever claimed it.
Two details in the record run in the officer's favor and deserve to be stated plainly, because this site exists to document what the record shows, whatever it shows. The dogs were, per the account, actively chasing people when the officer arrived. And he reached for a less-lethal option — the Taser — before the gun, shooting only after the Taser proved ineffective.
The Baltimore Police Department opened a Special Investigations Response Team investigation, and footage of the shooting is to be released under the department's critical incident policy — a policy that, whatever else can be said of it, treats an officer killing a dog as an event serious enough to require showing the public the video.
What the investigation concluded, the record does not say. No discipline was reported, and nothing in the account suggests any was sought. The costs here landed almost entirely on an animal no one would answer for: a stray pit bull, collarless and nameless, that was Tased, then shot, and never claimed by anyone. It died a stray, and in the record it remains one — the investigation into its death filed under a case number instead of a name.