Cries Unanswered, Dogs Maul Boy

ST. LOUIS —  They heard suffering.

They couldn’t tell exactly what it was or where it came from. It sounded awful. That was all they knew. Questioned later, they told police only that they had heard “something suffering out there.”

How right--how horribly right--they were.

The noise that residents of an urban neighborhood heard just after supper Monday was the sound of a boy being eaten alive by a pack of dogs.

Ten-year-old Rodney McAllister, a chatterbox of a fourth-grader, was mauled to death on the concrete basketball court at the park across the street from his family’s apartment. A passerby found Rodney’s body the next morning.

And now this stunned city wonders why.

Why so many dogs were roaming the park, despite repeated calls from neighbors to animal control.

Why adults who heard the howls and moans shut their windows and did nothing.

Why Rodney’s mother didn’t worry when he failed to come home for dinner--or for bedtime, or for school the next morning--after heading to the park with his basketball at 5 p.m.

Dogs Had Run of Neighborhood

St. Louis Police Chief Ron Henderson had few answers Thursday. “In my 30 years on the force, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “I’m not just talking as a chief of police, but as a parent.”

Rodney’s body was chewed all over. The pathologist suspects the boy was eaten while still alive.

Fatal dog bites are unusual: one study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found an average of 16 lethal dog attacks a year between 1979 and 1996. But most such tragedies involve dogs confined on their owners’ property, most often pit bulls or Rottweilers kept as pets. Only 24% of fatal attacks involve dogs on the loose.

By all accounts, the dogs that killed Rodney had the run of the neighborhood.

It’s a bedraggled neighborhood in north St. Louis, blocks of low-income apartments next to stately but crumbling brick houses. There aren’t any businesses to speak of. Deserted buildings pock the streets. The park, though, is well-tended and inviting, 10 acres of grassy play space with slides and swings and benches, with a baseball field and basketball court and a slightly rusted jungle gym shaped like a rocket ship.

Neighbors had repeatedly called animal control to complain about the pack of strays--three or four animals by some accounts, 10 or 15 by others--that hung out at a vacant building next to the park. The dogs knocked over garbage cans in search of food. And while they didn’t seem overly aggressive, mail carrier Barraka Nephilim was worried enough to pick up a brick or a large stick whenever he delivered letters near the park. “To run them off,” he said.

“They didn’t look fierce, but when you have that many together, it’s not safe,” agreed Adrienne Whiters, a mother of two who lives across the street. “They were mangy little mutts.”

In the week before Rodney died, animal control received two complaints about the dogs. Officers responded but couldn’t find any strays.

They returned after the tragedy and rounded up 10 dogs.

Yet not all of the dogs were wild. Six have been claimed by owners. “This is not so much an animal problem, but a people problem,” said Rich Stevson, manager of the city’s Animal Control Center. “People need to restrain their pets.”

Indeed, experts agree that even house dogs can become vicious if they’re allowed to run wild. “It’s like mob rule. They follow the same instincts as a wolf pack,” said Kim Blindauer, an epidemiologist who studies dog bites at the CDC.

Rodney McAllister was a victim of that pack aggression.

Described by his former teacher as “just a sweetheart of a kid,” Rodney loved to read and draw cartoons. He was always volunteering to water the plants or sweep the floor in his classroom.

“If he was helping, he was happy,” said the teacher, Lori Ward.

Rodney was always giving her hugs, Ward said, or pulling her aside to chitchat about a movie he’d seen or the T-shirt he was wearing. “He just wanted someone to listen,” she said. “You couldn’t not like Rodney.”

His Mother Assumed He Stayed at Friend’s

But behind his cheery chatter, Rodney led a grim life. He lived for a time in a shelter with his older brother and his mother, Gladys Loman, who moved to St. Louis last year after allegedly fleeing a weapon charge in rural Missouri.

When officers came to Loman’s door Tuesday morning after discovering Rodney’s body, she didn’t know her son was missing, police said. She just assumed he had slept over at a friend’s house, she told the officers.

Loman was charged with endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor. She is in jail on that count and the weapon charge. Her older son is with relatives.

And those who knew Rodney are left to wonder why.

“I can’t understand it,” Ward said. “I always thought St. Louis was a better place than this.”