A baby, a five-year-old, and three senior citizens among recent victims
TAR HEEL, North Carolina; OPELOUSAS, Louisiana; CLEARLAKE OAKS, California; GRAHAM, Washington; DIGHTON, Massachusetts––Loose ends confound reportage of five fatal alleged dog attacks occurring in the U.S. during the first 15 days of August 2026, and at least one more of several occurring abroad.
The victim has yet to be identified in the case of an infant under six months of age who was killed by two dogs on August 5, 2026 in Tar Heel, North Carolina, human population only 90.
Neither have the dogs been identified in any authoritative manner, despite local rumors that they were pit bulls belonging to the family of the victim.
“The sheriff’s office, the District Attorney’s Office and the Department of Social Services are conducting a joint investigation into the death,” reported Kaitlyn Aguiles and Gray News staff for WECT television in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Bear, puma, or Cane Corso at the scene?
The victim and her family also have yet to be identified in the case of a five-year-old girl found dead in Graham, Washington, in the foothills of the Cascades mountains.
Graham, population 35,000, is an eastern outer suburb of the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia corridor.
Police responding to a 911 call from the girl’s grandmother, who reported the girl missing only ten minutes after the grandmother last saw her, “discovered the child’s body in the yard of the residence,” Pierce County Sheriff’s Office detective Josh Mills told Jason Stutch of MyNorthwest.com.
“A large, aggressive dog,” later identified as a Cane Corso, “was between [police] and the child. They had to shoot the dog,” Mills explained.
The victim had “wounds consistent with a large animal attack,” Mills said.
“The girl and grandmother were visiting the home,” from Spanaway, nine miles northwest, “and preparing to go camping. The child had been around the dog before,” Mills added.
DNA testing should tell the tale
Social media postings purporting to come from friends of family members insisted that the child was actually killed by a cougar [puma], and that the Cane Corso had been protecting the victim from the puma.
“We can’t say for certain if it was a dog, or a cougar, or bear. There’s wildlife out there,” Mills told media. We’re unsure,” pending DNA testing.
“From a police standpoint,” Mills continued, “we don’t know if something happened to the girl beforehand and then some animal got her. We don’t know. It was unwitnessed.”
“The child’s body is now with the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office,” Franque Thompson of Fox 13 in Seattle updated, “to determine her official cause of death, while animal control examines the deceased dog. The sheriff’s office has also launched an investigation, working with forensic experts to analyze blood and tissue samples collected from the scene.
“Authorities stressed that the full investigation will take time as scientific findings develop,” Thompson said.
Charges in Des Moines infant death case
Both the Tar Heel and Graham cases are somewhat reminiscent of the April 3, 2026 death of the infant child, who has also not yet been named, of Elderidge Graham, 37, and Kristi Haney, 30, in Des Moines, Iowa.
Reported KCII television from Des Moines, “Court documents say security camera footage shows the parents left their 4 children, including an infant, unattended around a pit bull terrier who was known to be aggressive.
“The infant was dead when first responders arrived at the scene.”
Parents Elderidge Graham and Kristi Haney surrendered to police on July 10, 2026, facing charges of child endangerment causing death and three counts of child endangerment creating substantial risk.
“Satan uses any way possible to get to our children”
Haney posted to Facebook on October 1, 2022 that she had “cut everything out of our home that was demonic, evil, false teaching, magic etc. and away from my children and their TVs.
Guys,” Haney warned, “Satan comes to steal, kill and destroy, and he does it through simple things such as TV, internet etc. He uses any way possible to get to our children!!!!”
Haney evidently did not consider that one of Satan’s ways might include keeping a pit bull around her children.
Carrying art work is trigger
Somewhat less mysterious were the dog attack deaths of three senior citizens: Horace Brooks, 69, of Opelousas, Louisiana; Roy Charles Clayton, 71, of Clearlake Oaks in northern California; and Margaret Pacheco, of Dighton, Rhode Island.
Brooks, reported Bailey Wilson for KLFY television in Lafayette, Louisiana, was attacked by two pit bulls belonging to nearby resident Kimberly Faulk, 49, while walking near his home shortly after midnight.
Brooks “was carrying a black bag and some artwork,” Wilson said, when Faulk “arrived home around midnight with both dogs inside her vehicle.”
Explained Opelousas police chief Graig LeBlanc, “She exited the car to enter her home when the dogs also exited the car. At that time is when the dogs initiated the attack.”
Victim “was afraid of dogs”
Resumed Wilson, “Faulk was arrested and booked into the St. Landry Parish jail on one count of negligent homicide and two counts of unlawful restraint of a dog.”
Faulk “did contact the police department, and report it,” LeBlanc said.
“Horace was such a kind man,” remembered acquaintance Melinda Terracina on Facebook. “He lived in my cousin’s apartment that I manage. He was afraid of dogs, and sadly that is how he died. He will be missed.”
Added a relative, Hilda Elliott, “If you knew Horace Brooks, you knew a character. He was one of the first to welcome me into the Brooks family. Every time I’d see him, he had a smile and a joke.”
Bloody pit bulls impounded at scene
Roy Charles Clayton, 71, was found dead in Clearlake Oaks, California, shortly after 5:30 p.m. on August 13, 2026, reported Elizabeth Larson for Lake County News, “after two callers reported a male screaming, dogs barking, and a pit bull running around the area, covered in blood, according to radio traffic of the incident.”
Lake County Animal Care & Control immediately impounded two female pit bulls near the scene who “were discovered to have blood on them,” Larson continued.
Said Lake County Animal Care & Control director Rachel Smith, to Larson, “One dog appears to have sustained a relatively minor injury to her neck. We are attempting to determine how the injury was caused. That dog is being medically treated while at the shelter.
“The initial investigating animal control officer and I both interviewed one of the dog owners,” Smith added, who “willingly surrendered one of the dogs to the shelter for euthanasia. However, given that this is still an ongoing investigation, we are continuing to hold both dogs alive for the time being due to public health quarantine procedures and legal proceedings.”
Soaring stats
Finished Larson, “The Lake County Sheriff’s Office said it has requested that the Lake County District Attorney’s Office review the case for possible criminal charges related to a felony, owning an animal that caused the death of a person.”
Larson mentioned that “Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that deaths related to dog bites in the United States averaged about 43 per year in the time period from 2011 to 2021.”
However, the post-2021 average has soared to 46 deaths per year due to pit bull attacks alone, with 53 known deaths by dog attack in 2026 as of August 20, 2026, 35 of them by pit bull.
(Facebook photo)
“Austrian shepherd”?
Several loose ends remained for ten days about the August 17, 2026 death of Margaret Pacheco, 86, who was severely facially injured on August 15, 2026 in her home in Dighton, Rhode Island, by a dog identified to media by the Bristol County district attorney’s office as an “Austrian shepherd.”
As there is no such recognized breed as “Austrian shepherd,” and a photo of the dog was not provided, the dog is provisionally believed to have been an Australian shepherd. On August 28, 2026, however, photos provided by the family established that the “Austrian shepherd” was in truth a pit bull.
How the injury occurred was not explained.
Carl Sisson reported for WPRI in East Providence, Rhode Island, that Pacheco, who had existed serious medical issues, “lived at the home with another family member, along with the dog.”
Christophe Ellul walks with suspended sentence for Elisa Pilarski death
Fatal dog attacks have also been in the news from several other nations.
In Soissons, France, Christophe Ellul, 51, was on June 11, 2026 convicted of involuntary manslaughter and given a suspended four-year prison sentence for November 16, 2019 pit bull attack death of his 29-year-old fiancé Elisa Pilarski, who was six months’ pregnant at the time.
Pilarski, who had pit bulls of her own, “had been out walking their two-year-old American pit bull terrier named Curtis,” summarized Agence France Presse.
Both Curtis and Drago, another of Ellul’s pit bulls, Beth Clifton of ANIMALS 24-7 revealed six days after the fatal attack, were pedigreed two-year-old American pit bull terriers apparently bred by Sharon De Wit of Hitam Kennel in the Netherlands.
Pedigree papers indicated that Curtis, originally named Dark Midnight, was descended in part from a pit bull named “Garner’s Biscuit,” produced in 2014 by North Carolina breeder Tom Garner.
68 dogs tested to establish guilt
As pit bulls are banned in France, Curtis was imported from the Netherlands to France using paperwork misidentifying Curtis as a 34-pound Patterdale/ whippet mix, not a pit bull of nearly twice that size.
“Minutes before Pilarski died,” Agence France Press recounted, Pilarski “called Ellul at work to say she had been bitten and she could not control Curtis, the investigation showed.
Despite that, “Ellul long argued that Curtis was not aggressive. He said that the hounds taking part in a deer hunt must have been responsible. But DNA tests showed that the pit bull was the culprit. Sixty-two hunting hounds and the couple’s other five dogs were also tested to exclude their involvement.”
(See Verdict in long-delayed Elisa Pilarski pit bull death trial not due before June.)
Curtis, now eight-and-a-half years old, reportedly remains impounded.
Australian case kept in the dark
A 55-year-old man was fatally mauled by his own dog in Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia on July 12, 2026.
However, neither the identity of the man nor the breed of the dog had been disclosed more than a month later.
A police investigation reportedly continued.
British owner charged with manslaughter
In Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England, Lee Ellis, 55 “has been charged with manslaughter following the death of a man who was bitten by a dog during an altercation on a footpath in Wakefield, West Yorkshire,” reported Shubhi Kumar for the Sunday Guardian on August 18, 2026.
Ellis’ German shepherd apparently killed James Judge, 55, “on the old railway line footpath off Blacker Lane in Calder Grove, Wakefield,” Kumar continued.
Updated Mirror reporter Lucy Thornton, “Ellis, a farrier, had been out walking his two dogs, one described as an Alsatian crossed with an Australian Huntaway,” actually a mastiff variant of New Zealand origin, “when a dispute occurred with Judge over the right-of-way.”
Ellis was released on bail.
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Most people have no knowledge about what it takes to be a responsible dog owner. They don’t learn about the breed they own, nor do they provide them with appropriate exercise and socialization.
Some of our local shelters have a “clear the shelter day,” when people get to go home with a dog they got for “half price”… that’s just lovely.
I hope that some day, people can own robot dogs only.
For years now, your investigations of these horrific attacks has given evidence of the danger of owning such potentially ‘dangerous’ dogs and yet little to nothing is done legally to curtail this practice, as those who find such a label to be ‘unfair’ and ‘un-American’.
Other countries have understood that there must be caution in their being adopted, and some have even banned them, but not in the USA. ‘Breed-specific’ is not tolerated in this country.
In my opinion, they should at least be ‘grandfathered out’, but even that proposal appears to go nowhere with those in a position to effect such change. No one could do more than you and similar warnings from Phyllis Daugherty of Animal Issues to express your concerns of the lethal dangers of some members of this breed, and for that I thank you.
The growing number of attacks does not appear to be taken seriously as warranted, so I fear they will continue unabated, which to many animal advocates is unforgivable. Public health cries out for attention to be paid and will be until eventually it is, though when that day arrives is unknown.