A 68-year-old man is dead because the authorities in Washington Park, Illinois, couldn't be bothered to deal with a roaming pack of dogs that neighbors say had been terrorizing the community for years.
James L. Gibson was taking a smoke break from work on a rental property Thursday night when at least five dogs attacked him on the 2100 block of N. 49th Street. The pack dragged him across the road and tried to pull him into a ditch. By the time police arrived, Gibson was dead — bitten across his face, torso, arms, and legs, according to First Alert 4. Officers shot several of the animals when they turned aggressive; the rest fled into nearby woods.
Neighbor Mike Tomlin heard it happen. "I heard the man screaming, and then I could hear dogs," he told First Alert 4. "I mean, he was screaming for his life."
This wasn't a surprise to anyone on 49th Street. Residents told Fox 2 that the same dogs have been escaping from a fenced-in yard for roughly two years. Google Street View images from April captured the pack roaming freely down the road among homes and outbuildings. Neighbor Aretha Harper said she encountered the dogs hours before the attack and that one followed her up her front steps. Residents were usually able to shoo them away — until they couldn't.
Yet St. Clair County Animal Control told Fox 2 it had never received a call about these dogs. Either neighbors are lying about years of complaints, or the agency tasked with handling dangerous animals completely failed at its one job. The Washington Park Police Department, for its part, couldn't be reached for comment.
Investigators labeled the dogs "strays." Neighbors say that's false — they know exactly whose yard the dogs keep escaping from. But no owner has been publicly identified, and apparently no one in local government has been interested in finding out.
The Gateway Pundit identified the animals as pitbulls; the New York Post described them only as "mixed breed." Both outlets confirmed the core facts of the mauling and the community's long-running complaints.
This is the bargain every level of government makes with the public: you surrender a portion of your liberty, and in return, the state protects you. Washington Park collected that bargain and delivered nothing. An elderly man working on a property at 10:45 at night was left to be torn apart by a known hazard that every official with the power to act chose to ignore.
The question now is whether anyone in St. Clair County will be held accountable — or whether James Gibson's death gets filed away as just another problem nobody could be bothered to solve.
