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NYPD Officer Docked 10 Vacation Days For Fatally Shooting Pit Bull
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jan 5, 2012
Modified Jan 5, 2012
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Jan 5, 2012
Modified Jan 5, 2012
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A Brooklyn officer who fatally shot a pit bull who attacked him and his partner has been docked 10 vacation days after a two-and-a-half year investigation. Officer Andre Jeter pleaded guilty to departmental charges in the 2009 shooting of the pit bull, to avoid an NYPD trial. Jeter was accused of shooting the dog an excessive number of times during the altercation. “It is an unusually heavy penalty for a dog shooting. But it shows how they go over every shooting with a fine-tooth comb,” a police source told the News.
The incident occurred on June 8, 2009, when Jeter and his partner, Officer Ansari Kalil were patrolling the Breukelen Houses in Canarsie. Responding to reports of a pit bull owner making threats to another man, the officers followed the suspect to the roof. “When they opened the door to the roof the pit bull charges out and jumps on [Kalil], knocking him to the ground and biting him on the wrist,” said Deputy Inspector Kim Royster, an NYPD spokeswoman. “The officer struggled with the dog and gets the dog off him, but now the officers can’t get the door open. The dog heads up the stairs towards them and that’s when they fire.”
Jeter fired three times, and Kalil fire twice. The dog fell to the ground still alive; that's when Jeter fired two more shots, killing the dog. While Kalil wasn't charged with anything, Jeter was charged for firing those last two shots when he was “no longer in danger.”
In November, an Upper East Side man was arraigned for bludgeoning his roommate to death, using his pit bull as a weapon in the attack. And last summer in Trenton, a pit bull survived being shot in the head by a police officer during a foot chase.
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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