The car sat idle on Crumpton Road just outside Red Bay, a city in northeastern Alabama on the Mississippi border, long enough for neighbors to become suspicious. But when the sheriff’s deputies arrived on Friday night, they found the owner of the car. She was dead – Jacqueline Summer Bard had been crushed by a herd of dogs. “In 27 years I have never seen anything like it,” County Sheriff Franklin Shannon Oliver told WTVA. These same dogs were the reason Beard had visited the area that morning, said the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. A 58-year-old Alabama Public Health Officer, Beard was following a report of a woman being attacked by a herd of dogs Thursday. By Friday night, investigators had arrested Brandy Lee Dowdy, the 39-year-old dog owner. He was charged with manslaughter, the sheriff’s office said. The prison records do not mention a lawyer for Dowdy, and the bond has not yet been determined. A police dog bit a woman on the head while she was screaming in pain. The surgeons had to reattach her scalp, says a lawsuit. Law enforcement officials also cited Emily’s law, a law passed in 2018 that allows prosecutors to charge dog owners with felonies if their pet seriously injures or kills someone and the owner was aware of the dog’s dangerous behavior. The law also creates guidelines for animal euthanasia. The law is in memory of Emily Colvin, who died at the age of 24 after being attacked by five dogs outside her home in Northeast Alabama in December 2017, AL.com reported. The dogs fell down. One week before Colvin’s death, another woman, 46-year-old Tracey Patterson Cornelius, was also killed by a herd of dogs. A second woman was seriously injured in the same incident, according to AL.com. Similar fatalities in the state occurred in 2020 to a 36-year-old mother of four and in 2021 to a 70-year-old man. The video shows the driver shouting as his police dog bites his hand at a traffic stop. He sued the department after 3 surgeries. Beard went to the Red Bay area on Friday to investigate a dog attack that took place Thursday afternoon when a woman on a walk was crushed by animals. “He was in a very serious condition,” the sheriff, Oliver, told AL.com. Investigators said Beard was trying to contact the dog’s owner when he was killed. The dogs attacked the people again around 6pm when the sheriff’s deputies arrived to investigate the suspicious car that had been parked on the side of the road all day, law enforcement officials said. “When the deputies arrived, they were met by residents on Crumpton Road,” the sheriff’s office said. “Several dogs started attacking the residents when MPs were there and one person was slightly injured.” There were seven dogs in all, Oliver said. Some were “immediately euthanized,” according to the sheriff’s office. Ryan Easterling, deputy director of communications for the Alabama Department of Public Health, said in a statement to news agencies that the department was mourning Beard’s death. “Summer was known to her colleagues as a great person. “It was a great team and it was loved by those who knew it,” he said. “It’s a very sad day for ADPH.”
