As Rosemary Cuevas cleans up her yard - the spot where her dog was shot by police - she still doesn't know what to think. Her 3-year-old Dalmatian mix Julio is alive, but she frets knowing it happened because of her own phone call to police.
"I haven't been right in my head. I haven't been able to sleep," she said.
It all happened outside her house on Stoddard Avenue near 10th Street. Cuevas said she saw burglars trying to steal wiring from the vacant home behind her on Wednesday at about 7 p.m. She called 911 and told police, but she didn't even know officers had arrived until she heard gunfire.
She said police told her that when they arrived, they tried to go through her backyard to get to the burglary-in-progress. They say they shook the fence to alert any dogs and heard nothing.
But when the officer jumped into the yard, he saw a dog charging at him. In a statement, police said, "The officer felt he was in danger of great bodily injury and fired one time at the dog. The dog was transported to a nearby animal hospital, and was later released to the owner."
Police never caught the burglars.
Cuevas said she understands that the officer felt threatened, but she questioned why they didn't let her know first that they needed to enter her yard.
"If they would have just called me, I would have helped them out," she said.
Cuevas said a police officer stopped by on Thursday to give her instructions on how to seek reimbursement from the city. But she's still angry at what happened to her dog.
"I respect them, I've always respected them, and I know we all do mistakes, but just make my little Julio better," she said.
