FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. (WSVN) - Doctors are attempting to determine whether or not they will have to amputate the arms of a woman who was mauled by one of her pit bulls while she was visiting South Florida relatives.
That victim, 43-year-old Yasmin Adam, remains hospitalized Tuesday at Broward Health Medical Center, one day after the attack.
She was visiting her teenage nephew when her three dogs began to fight. When she tried to break them up, she was attacked by the oldest and biggest of the pets.
Audio of the 911 call captures the panic in the nephew’s voice:
Dispatcher: “911, what is your emergency?”
Nephew: “Yes, hello. I have a dog that went rampant in my house and started to attack its owner.”
Moments later. the audio captures Adam’s moans and screams.
Nephew: “Please! She’s screaming right now. [The dog] took her arm.”
He is then heard talking to Adam, then screaming at the canine to release her. “What do you want me to do? Let her go!” he said.
Officials said the victim was alone when the attack began. “She was in the apartment by herself, and her nephew came in and saw the attack in progress, ran out of the apartment and called 911,” said Lauderhill Police Maj. Rick Rocco.
According to a neighbor, the attack was so severe that Adam stopped resisting during the attack.
She was rushed to the hospital only after police arrived and one of the officers shot and injured the attacking dog. “She was conscious, she wasn’t really saying much,” said neighbor Joyce Jacob.
7News was on the scene as she was transported. Adam’s wounds were in plain sight on her hands and arms, but Jacob said, the wounds were all over the victim’s body. “On both her arms, her face, her feet, I’m assuming the side of her because there was blood on the side of her,” Jacob said. “The dogs were actually ripping her clothes off, because her clothes were hanging and dangling.”
The biggest dog police believe is responsible concerns Jacob because she claimed the victim complained that it recently became more aggressive. “So she’d recently started walking the two smaller ones. She would go back, and she would get the bigger one,” said Jacob, “but yeah, she would walk the dogs faithfully every day.”
Police barricaded the pit bulls until dog handlers removed them from the apartment. “I think if [her nephew] didn’t come home, she would have gotten killed,” said the neighbor.
“They never really bark at no one outside, and so I’m very much surprised at this incident,” said another neighbor.
“I engaged with them,” said Manolo Anthony Layne, who works at the apartment complex. “I’m passing this way … and those dogs would do nothing, not to me.”
The dog police believe is responsible for the attack has since been put down while the other two are currently in the care of Broward County Animal Control.
Adam underwent surgery and remains in critical condition.
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