A Florida man was mauled to death by a pack of dogs as he walked through a wooded shortcut back to his home.
Melvin Olds Jr., 45, was found on July Fourth in a wooded area near Lake Place with over 100 dog bites on his body, according to a statement by the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office.
According to the sheriff’s office, an autopsy established that he had “likely” been killed from the dog attack, confirming the results of investigations by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the sheriff’s office.
“Final determination will be made after toxicology reports are completed, which typically takes many weeks, but no wounds other than those caused by dogs were found on Olds’ body during an autopsy today (July 5),” said a statement from the Sheriff’s Office.
AUTOPSY DETERMINES MAN LIKELY DIED FROM DOG ATTACKLAKE PLACID — Independent investigations by the Highlands County…
Highlands County Sheriff's Office စာစုတင်ရာတွင် အသုံးပြုမှု ၂၀၁၉၊ ဇူလိုင် ၅၊ သောကြာနေ့
He had last been seen several hours earlier, taking a shortcut through the wooded area where his body was found.
Olds was a father of five, and a grandfather reported WFLA.
His mother, Cythnia Hill described her son as a “good person, a good man” in a CNN interview. She said that the attack was just “so unexpected.”
“I thought that dogs were supposed to be man’s best friend,” she said.
Olds’s fiancée, Jannell Ward, told WFLA she saw a pack of dogs in their neighborhood but had never felt threatened.
“They growled a couple times but they never ran up to me,” she said. “They never came at me or insinuated that they were going to bite me. I never got that feeling.”
Authorities have caught six dogs in the area. “Their bite size matches with the wounds on Olds’ body, but that alone is not enough to say for sure that they were the animals involved,” said the sheriff’s office in a statement. “DNA from those dogs will be compared to DNA collected from the wounds to see if a positive connection can be made.”
“While we may have the dogs that were responsible for this horrible tragedy, we won’t know for sure for a while,” Sheriff Paul Blackman said. “I want to encourage residents of Highway Park and the surrounding area to be on the lookout for any loose dogs, especially those that seem aggressive. We don’t want anyone else to be injured.”
According to CNN, the dogs were all pit bull mixes.
Some locals accused the sheriff’s office of withholding information about the breed of the dogs.
“This is such an unnecessary problem. Being killed by pit bulls is an agonizing, terrifying, horrifically barbaric way to die,” wrote one person on the sheriff’s office Facebook page. “It needs to stop. Everyone protecting pit bulls are perpetuating these agonizing deaths. Show photos of the dogs.”
Such attacks by packs of dogs are very rare, according to experts.
In February this year, a toll booth worker was mauled to death in Mexico in a gruesome attack that was caught on security camera.
When they found the naked body of a woman near the highway with gouge marks and missing chunks of flesh, police first thought she had been tortured, raped, and thrown from a passing vehicle by a gang—another victim of Mexico’s violence.
But when investigators reviewed the CCTV footage near the toll booth in the city of Tecamac, Mexico, they concluded that she had been mauled to death by a pack of dogs in an attack that lasted 12 minutes.
In the United States, around 30 to 40 people die each year from dog attack injuries, according to Richard Polsky, an animal behavior and dog-bite expert in Los Angeles. Polsky told Live Science that there are an estimated 100,000 are injured badly enough to require plastic surgery or extensive suturing.