Dog shot to death
Creswell, OR (US)Incident Date: Tuesday, Mar 25, 2008
County: Lane
Disposition: Open
Suspect(s) Unknown - We need your help!
The Lane County District Attorney's Office has dropped an animal abuse charge filed early this year against a 12-year-old Creswell boy in connection with the fatal shooting of a dog in his neighborhood.
Attorney Richard Mullen, who represented Levi Dunn in the case, said this week that his client was cleared by ballistic tests in April. Lane County Deputy District Attorney Mark Haight confirmed Thursday that the charge was dismissed in May "because we couldn't prove it."
Mullen said Oregon State Police bullet tests showed that a pellet gun Lane County Sheriff's Office investigators spotted and took from Levi's house did not kill a neighbor's pet boxer, Rosie. "They seized the pellet gun he allegedly used, and it was smooth bore," Mullen said. "The pellet that killed the poor dog had rifling marks."
Mullen provided copies of a police report on the case and a report by an Oregon State Police forensic scientist stating that the gun seized from Levi's house did not fire the pellet removed from Rosie's body by a veterinarian.
The 3-year-old dog, a family pet belonging to Randy and Sharon Prater, died after a single pellet struck her in the chest as she followed their 8-year-old son, Ben, down a neighborhood street.
Levi, then 11, was not identified by name in news accounts of his arrest because he was a juvenile. But Mullen said he contacted The Register-Guard about the case being dismissed because Levi's identity was well-known in the small community.
"He's still getting harassed and called 'dog killer,' " Mullen said.
Levi's father, Larry, said a uniformed sheriff's deputy "marched him from the school to my home, seven blocks away" to retrieve the gun, in view of neighbors and other students.
Mullen and Dunn acknowledged that Levi confessed to the shooting, but said he did so under pressure from a sheriff's deputy during an interview at school in which he first repeatedly denied doing so.
"He has a real bad case of attention-deficit disorder, and he was told that if he did it, they'd log it out as an accident," the attorney said.
A police report account of that interview by officer Pat O'Neill noted that "Levi was very nervous and fidgeted while talking to me." It recounts numerous denials by Levi, including one in which he said, "I pinky swear I did not shoot Rosie." But it also alleged that details changed in the boy's account of what he was doing the afternoon of the shooting as the deputy questioned him about the incident.
The report did not include any promise that the incident would be treated as an accident. O'Neill recounts, however, that he told Levi that he could "understand how a young man could make a mistake and maybe try to shoot near a dog to scare it," and that "if he did shoot Rosie and it was an accident, that it would be much better for him to admit that he did it and it was an accident."
O'Neill also reported asking Levi if he "ever watched crime TV shows like 'C.S.I.' " and if "he ever saw a show where they had compared bullets and found that they were fired out of the same gun."
"I told Levi that each gun leaves a different mark on a bullet when it is fired and that the same mark is left on each bullet, kind of like a fingerprint that is unique to only that gun."
Ironically, it was just such "fingerprints" that showed Levi's gun did not fire the fatal shot.
In an interview Thursday, Levi said he confessed because he wanted to get out of the interview and go back to class.
He said he lost "tons of friends" over the incident. Larry Dunn, a single father, said the case became "very high profile," at one point becoming the subject of what he called an inflammatory program on a regional talk radio show.
Levi said he hopes public knowledge that the case was dismissed will put an end to the ostracism he has experienced.
"I just want everyone to start treating me like a normal kid," he said. References« OR State Animal Cruelty Map
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