The couple across the street from an 11-year-old blue heeler mix named Oscar were so afraid of him that each carried a gun to their own mailbox, the wife testified. The man next door saw them loose “at least every other day.” On June 3, 2014, with the dog’s owners away on vacation, Oscar got through an open gate and bit a woman walking by with a friend. A Parker County jury awarded her $695,000, and a Texas appeals court affirmed.
The complaints had run for weeks, court records show. The neighbor across the street testified that Oscar and another dog came to her yard daily, growling and digging at her fence. When her husband called, the dog’s owner answered, “[O]h, the kids probably left the gate open again.” The neighbor offered to show her the hole in the fence the dogs used; the owner declined. The neighbor later spent $16,000 on a fence to keep the dogs out.
The man next door testified he ran the dogs back into the hole in the owners’ fence after they mauled the nose of a sick cow in his pasture…