Sheriff’s deputy starts a visit by shooting a dog, ends it with a warrantless search

A Wake County, North Carolina, sheriff’s deputy entered a private home with no warrant and no occupants, immediately shot the homeowner’s dog

A Wake County, North Carolina, sheriff’s deputy entered a private home with no warrant and no occupants, immediately shot the homeowner’s dog, and then called in more deputies to continue searching the house without notifying the family.

The murder of a very good dog, Zelda, was not the end of this Wake County deputy’s warrantless search. It was the beginning. The deputy crossed the threshold of a private residence without legal authority and fired almost immediately. Only after killing Zelda did he radio for backup, at which point additional officers arrived and proceeded to search the home, still without a warrant and still without informing the owners that law enforcement was inside their house. The home security cameras show the deputy lying about the killing.

This sequence matters. Police departments justify shootings by claiming officers were forced to react to sudden danger. Here, the deputy clearly created any perceived danger himself. There was no emergency call, no consent, and no legal justification for entry. The animal reacted to an armed stranger inside its home. That reaction was then used to rationalize both lethal force and an expanded search.

If anyone had bothered to educate this LEO, he would have known that the Fourth Amendment states a home is the most protected space a person has. Warrantless entry is allowed only under extremely narrow exceptions, none of which appear to apply here. Yet instead of returning when someone was home, the illegal entry became the basis for further violations. Once the gunshot happened, the sheriff’s office treated the scene as theirs to manage, rather than as evidence of a constitutional violation.

The laundry machine was running. No one was home. There were no signs of forced entry. All the excuses for entering this home are contrived, at best. Naturally, the internal review of this officer’s abuses cleared him.

Once, the Marin County Sheriff’s Department came to my home and entered through my gates without permission to notify me about an event going on down the street and to stay inside. I locked my pupper inside my house, but even with merely him barking, one of the deputies stood there with his hand on his gun the whole time, as if he was about to face off with a dog he’d never seen on a peaceful “FYI” call or shoot a sleepy man in his pajamas. Why do cops seem so prone to shooting dogs?