Detectives from the Shelby County Sherriff’s Office in Tennessee Saturday revealed the identities of a 5-month old boy and 2-year-old girl who were mauled to death by their family dogs Wednesday.
Previously, the department announced that the baby and toddler were pronounced dead at the scene – their home near Shelby Forest State Park – and that the dogs attacked them and their 30-year-old mother at around 3:30 p.m.
As of Saturday, Kristie (spelled Kristey in some posts) Bennard remained hospitalized in non-critical condition, said authorities. Her children were identified as Hollace Bennard and Lillie (sometimes reported as Lilly) Bennard.
“This is still an ongoing investigation,” said the sheriff’s department.
When the family dogs attacked her children, their mother “put her body on top of Lilly’s to try and protect her,” Kristie Bennard’s uncle by marriage, Jeff Gibson, told USA TODAY Saturday. Then, the dogs began attacking her. Gibson also told the outlet that the mauling lasted for around 10 minutes. He said in a Facebook post that Kristie had many stitches and called her a “hero.”
“I don’t know if there can be a healing process but hopefully we can ALL find a way to cope with this tragedy,” he added.
A family friend told Fox News Friday that Kristie and her husband, Colby Bennard, had their two pit bulls, Mia and Cheech, for more than eight years and that the dogs had never been violent before. Both dogs have been euthanized, according to USA TODAY.
According to the Daily Beast, Kristie Bennard’s best friend, Kelsey Gallini, criticized media attention to the tragedy on Facebook.
“Just to stir the pot on the war on pitbulls? You’re disgusting,” she wrote, according to the outlet.
According to a 2018 report in Forbes, pit bulls were identified in separate studies ranging from 1976 to 1996 and from 2005 to 2017 as the dog breed responsible for the most fatal attacks in the U.S. However, the site Pitbullinfo.org argues that statistics about pit bulls are misleading and that it is hard to actually identify the dogs based on DNA.
Pit bulls are descendants of English bull-baiting dogs bred to bite and hold bulls, bears and other large animals around the face and head, according to American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
“When baiting large animals was outlawed in the 1800s, people turned instead to fighting their dogs against each other,” the organization explained. “These larger, slower bull-baiting dogs were crossed with smaller, quicker terriers to produce a more agile and athletic dog for fighting other dogs.”
Over the following centuries, pit bulls were bred for various reasons, including fighting and companionship. Today, most pit bull type dogs are likely “the result of random breeding – two dogs being mated without regard to the behavioral traits being passed on to their offspring,” the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said.
“The result of random breeding is a population of dogs with a wide range of behavioral predispositions,” it added. “For this reason, it is important to evaluate and treat each dog, no matter its breed, as an individual.”
In the U.S., more than 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year and nearly one in five require medical attention, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
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