Over two years ago an innocent man, Joseph Lee Pettaway was mauled to death by a police dog. The incident took place in Montgomery, Alabama where police allowed the K9 to tear apart the body of the 51-year-old after he was mistaken for a burglar. Last week, Pettaway’s family got the body camera footage of the encounter after filing for a subpoena. The family is now calling for some of the footage “to be publicly entered into evidence, fighting the ‘confidential’ designation of the video.”
The incident took place after someone called police on Pettaway and his sister Yvonne Pettaway-Frazie. The pair were on their way to their mother’s home at the time.
“I saw it with my own eyes,” Pettaway- Frazie told the Montgomery Advertiser. “His flesh was all on the ground that morning.” The family has since filed a lawsuit to get justice. According to court documents, officer Nicholas Barber, the dog’s handler, stood and watched for nearly two minutes as the dog attacked Pettaway.
“Despite Mr. Pettaway’s obvious and profuse bleeding and his apparently going into shock, no policeman examines or evaluates (Pettaway’s) wound and no policeman administers any of the most basic, essential, obvious and immediately required care to stem or reduce his bleeding,” documents read.
Another officer allegedly asked Barber if Pettaway “got a bite,” and Barber replied, “f**k yeah.”
Despite him getting badly injured by their K-9, the document also reports that many police officers on site failed to provide first aid to Pettaway. It was even reported that officer Barber joked around with fellow officers and took pictures of Pettaway’s dead body.
“They stood up there and let the dog kill him,” she said. “They need to pay for what they did. If someone had killed the dog, they’d have made them pay for it. They stand out there and hold a conversation after letting the dog chew him like a piece of meat, watching him bleed to death.”
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