Deputies ticket Rock Hill man after he shoots neighbor’s dog

York County deputies ticketed a local man on Monday afternoon after his neighbor accused him of maliciously shooting her dog and video evidence showed the man pursuing the dog before shooting it, sheriff’s office records show.

The sheriff’s office went to the Homestead Road neighborhood after the man called police to say he’d shot a dog while it was on his property. He told deputies that dogs had been running loose in his yard and because he was afraid of the dogs, he’d been carrying a gun.

On Monday afternoon, a small dog was in the man’s backyard, barking, and it began running toward him, he told police. The man said he wasn’t wearing his glasses and could not see well but that he saw the dog running toward him.

The man, age 57, shot the dog once with a shotgun and killed it, the report states.

He told police he had surveillance video footage of the incident and offered to show deputies the video.

Deputies say the video shows the man walk around the corner of his home, “entering the backyard with his shotgun ready.” The deputies also wrote in the report that the video appears to show the man spotting the dog in his yard and continuing “toward it as (the dog) runs across (the man’s) yard and toward its own yard.”

Based on the video footage the man provided, deputies concluded that the man showed “no fear of the dog as he said he was and instead actually pursued after the dog to the center of (his) yard.”

While the man claimed that the dog was attacking him, the video shows a “large amount of space between the two” during the incident, the sheriff’s office report states.

The dog’s owner told deputies that she adopted the dog – named Shaggy – and that it was a non-vicious pet. The report states that the dog weighed about 15 pounds. The owner told police she normally keeps her dog inside a gate in her yard but that Shaggy escaped that afternoon.

Deputies issued the dog owner a warning for the pet being loose. The man who shot the dog will appear in court at a later date on a charge of malicious injury to an animal.

This story was originally published March 11, 2015 at 5:05 PM with the headline "Deputies ticket Rock Hill man after he shoots neighbor’s dog."