11-Year Old Texas Boy Charged In Beating Death Of Dog

A 11-year-old boy has been charged in the death of a small Fort Worth Texas dog. Authorities say the boy will remain with his parents as Juvenile Services investigates the case, as reported by WFAA. Fort Worth police say they will file an animal cruelty-torture charge against an 11-year-old boy for the beating death of a dog earlier this week. The actual charge is delinquent conduct, animal cruelty-torture, which is a state jail felony. Police say Child Protective Services has been notified. The boy allegedly confessed to the beating, but told authorities he felt threatened by Cookie, a 15-pound Cavalier mix poodle.

“How can you be angry at an 11-year-old?” said the dog’s owner, Jennifer Knittel.

“But when you’re 11, you know the difference between right and wrong.”

Knittel is the owner of Cookie, who was playing in the backyard on Monday. Somehow Cookie, as well as Knittel’s other dog, a German Shepherd named Sam, ended up outside of the fence and in front of the house on Sleeping Doe Drive. Knittel suspects that the unidentified boy opened the unlocked gate to their yard, lured the animals out, and beat Cookie with a large stick from her backyard.

A neighbor reportedly came upon the scene around 4:30 p.m. “She said that my dogs were hiding under a truck and the boy was kicking at them, trying to get them out from under the truck [parked in the street],” Knittel told NBC 5. That neighbor circled back minutes later, Knittel said, and said she saw the boy in front of a home across the street. Cookie was lying still on the ground by the front door.

“She stopped the boy and she said, ‘Did you hurt that dog?’ And he said, ‘No, that dog is sleeping,’ ” Knittel said the witness said.

Knittel said an animal control investigator contacted her late Tuesday to say the results of her dog’s necropsy showed Cookie died as a result of a fractured skull and a severed spine, a result of many blows to the body. A Fort Worth police detective has spoken with the boy, as well as his parents, according to a department spokesperson.

The boy’s story is that the dog attacked him and he was defending himself, according to a neighbor who had spoken with the child’s parents. That neighbor told NBC 5 the suspect is a good kid who he trusts to play with his dogs.

Read about another animal cruelty case against a Pit Bull and her puppies that resulted in a happy ending as reported by the Inquisitr.