Three Year Old S. Illinois Toddler Dead from apparent dog attack

On Saturday night, three year old Gabrial Mandrell was found dead outside of his Johnson City, IL home -- dead from an apparent dog attack.

Mandrell's parents apparently put him to bed and checked on him around 7:30 on Saturday night. According to official reports, the boy apparently got up shortly after that, pushed the screen out of his bedroom window, and crawled out the window.  At that point, he was apparently attacked by at least one of the three mixed-breed dogs owned by the family that were out in the yard at the time.

The death is being ruled an accident.

Three year old kids are incredibly mobile, and are prone to finding ways out of the house and finding trouble once they do.  In this case it was tragically the dogs owned by the family.

I'll post more details as they emerge. This is starting to get picked up in a lot of newspapers this morning so I wanted to comment before it hit too many media outlets.

My heart and sympathies go out to the Mandrell family.

The three dogs owned by Mandrell's family are officially now being called a collie mix and two pit bull mixes. Officials are unsure which dog or dogs are responsible for the attack. 

Update #1: 6/30/09 - It sounds like the local Sheriff's office has all but concluded their investigation, and had ruled this to be a no-fault accident.  This just appears to be the perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances that led up to this unfortunate death.  According to the report:

-- None of the three family dogs had ever shown aggression to any family member

-- It is unknown which dog started the incident or which ones were involved in biting the child, but it appears that more than one dog was involved in attacking the child.

-- Apparently the young boy crawled out the window with a stuffed animal in tow -- and it is believed that the incident likely began over the stuffed animal.

-- The residence had no air conditioning and had numerous box fans on at the time that would have made it more difficult for the adults in the house to hear anything.

-- The adults were at the opposite side of the house to where the child's bedroom was and where the incident occurred. The boy was injured in such a way that would have made yelling impossible

-- The home appears to be in a very rural and wooded area, so there would have been no neighbors around to hear the commotion either.

This just truly looks like a terrible situation where a very mobile child got away when he should have been asleep, and ended up in the middle of a group of dogs with one or multiple members being toy motivated and caused a bad attack.  Again, my sincerest condolences to the family.

In total, this story was picked up by 27 news sources -- almost all in Southern Illinois.

Comments

[doug]

I'll bet you there is a 66.6% chance that one of the family's Pit Bulls killed the kid.

We have the cops in St. Pete kill another Pit Bull which was out of control today, attacking random people.

[Brent Toellner]

Statistically you're right of course Doug, but the reality is:

a) The Collie was the one dog that was chained up -- and yet couldn't be ruled out as one of the attacking dogs. Which makes it pretty likely to be the culprit.

and

b) It doesn't really matter which dog is responsible -- because as long as the general public, people like you and lawmakers try to pretend that the reason the child was killed was because of a breed of dog and not because the child was allowed to roam free at night by himself around dogs that clearly weren't well-socialized with him, we will continue to have horrible disasters like this. And instead of working on educating the public on WHY dog attacks like this happen, people like you would rather avoid the professional opinion of every expert organization out there and talk about dog breeds. That lack of education that you spread is making the problem worse, not better.

And I for one, am wanting to end the tragedies by focusing on solutions that really work.

[doug]

Stupid is as stupid does.

As long as we have stupid people in this world we are going to have a certain amount of dog bite deaths.

Support one of my ideas to no allow anyone convicted of a crime to own a dog over 20 pounds.

[Brent Toellner]

I'm not sure I've ever disagreed with this one. Obviously, instead of any crime, it should be no one convicted of a felony or a violent crime felony. I also think that exceptions should be made for dogs that come from prison dog programs (where dogs are given to prisoners during their prison time and have proven to help in criminal rehabilitation). I think maybe a better version of this is to be sure they cannot own an unaltered dog vs the weight limit. But yeah, in principle, this is a fine idea.