Man arrested after dogs attack police officer

An Ober­lin man has been charged with assault­ing a police offi­cer after set­ting his pit-bull-type dogs on an Ober­lin offi­cer in an attempt to keep from being arrested.

Lewis A. Wade, of Ober­lin, was arrested and charged with hav­ing an ani­mal at large, obstruct­ing offi­cial busi­ness, resist­ing an offi­cer, and sim­ple assault-police offi­cer after the events that took place Sun­day evening.

Accord­ing to the police report, at about 5:39 p.m., Patrol­man Marc Ellis was fin­ish­ing an acci­dent report in the 200 block of South Park Street. Ellis observed a large brown “pit-bull-type” dog run­ning through sev­eral yards in the block on South Park Street.

Ellis noted in the report that the dog was not on a leash and appeared to be chas­ing a ten­nis ball. Ellis then observed the dog return to a man he rec­og­nized as Wade, after pre­vi­ous deal­ings with him.

Wade threw the ball sev­eral more times and the dog con­tin­ued run­ning through the same yards to retrieve the ball. Ellis told Wade the dog could not run loose.

Accord­ing to the police report, Wade responded with, “Yeah right,” and pre­pared to again throw the ball, despite fur­ther warn­ings from Ellis that he would be cited for hav­ing a dog run­ning at large.

Wade looked at Ellis, issued a pro­fan­ity at Ellis, and pro­ceeded to throw the ball sev­eral yards over, accord­ing to the report. The dog again chased after the ball and Ellis told Wade he was going to receive a cita­tion and requested Wade pro­duce his iden­ti­fi­ca­tion for the citation.

Accord­ing to the report, Wade then stated, “(Pro­fan­ity), you want my I.D., I got some­thing for you,” and began walk­ing toward the side door of his house. Ellis began to fol­low Wade to the house, while request­ing backup, when Wade held the door open and started call­ing out sev­eral names.

Two more dogs ran out of the house, one of them being described in the report as a pit-bull-type, and ran toward Ellis. Wade then began yelling at the offi­cer to get off his prop­erty or the dogs would attack him.

Accord­ing to the report, Wade aggres­sively approached Ellis, and Ellis tried to push him way and draw his taser at the same time. One of the dogs then lunged toward the offi­cer and attempted to bite his elbow.

Ellis next attempted to push the dog to the ground and was bit­ten on the right wrist, caus­ing him to drop his taser. After being able to free him­self from the attack­ing dog, the offi­cer was then able to draw his gun and shot at the dogs in self defense.

Two rounds were fired at the most aggres­sive of the ani­mals, hit­ting the one that bit Ellis, accord­ing to the report. The dogs ran away and Ellis was then able to turn his atten­tion back to Wade, who was still yelling profanities.

Wade was advised that he was under arrest for assault­ing an offi­cer, and Wade con­tin­ued to taunt Ellis. At this time, Wade’s mother then came out­side and began to yell at the offi­cer not to shoot her dog.

When she real­ized her son was on the verge of get­ting tased, she advised her son to “do as the offi­cer says,” accord­ing to the report. Other offi­cers arrived on the scene, and even­tu­ally Wade was arrested, though he still put up a fight, accord­ing to Ellis.

When the offi­cers looked at Ellis’s injuries, they deter­mined the bites were only super­fi­cial. The report said the dog’s front teeth scraped the officer’s wrist, break­ing the skin in two places.

A neigh­bor claimed to have wit­nessed the events and sub­mit­ted a writ­ten state­ment to the Ober­lin PD.

Wade’s mother, iden­ti­fied as Lois Wade, was later con­tacted and stated all three dogs had returned to the house, though one seemed injured. Accord­ing to the report she was unco­op­er­a­tive, and would not answer any fur­ther questions.

Lewis Wade was issued a bond of $8,750, and was held in Lorain County Jail until his court date in Ober­lin Munic­i­pal Court. Police said he had also been issued a cita­tion for a dog at large on Feb. 3 and was also charged with men­ac­ing in that incident.

Posted by Scott Mahoney on Jun 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.