JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Jacksonville Sheriff’s Officer officers attempted to quell a heated armed confrontation in the Riverside neighborhood, leading to an altercation where an officer was bitten by a service dog.
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A dispute in the Riverside neighborhood escalated to an armed confrontation Friday after a woman with a gun threatened to call the police.
A woman’s husband was the victim of a car burglary last weekend. JSO said the woman, her 4-year-old child and their 10-year-old German Shepard, who was assigned to the retired veteran for PTSD by the Wounded Warriors, were searching to recover important items left behind from the burglary on the railroad tracks along College and Street and Willow Branch Avenue.
“Some of his property was already recovered over here on the tracks. So today she came out to walk the tracks to see if they found anything else. My understanding, there’s a bag missing. It was pretty significant to him. It’s got some emotional attachment,” JSO said in a news conference Friday evening.
During the search, the woman stumbled across a bicycle unrelated to the personal items she was trying to recover.
Another woman saw the mother messing with the bike, causing a dispute to become “a little heated,” JSO said.
JSO said the women started pushing each other and arguing over a “misunderstanding.” The woman with the child and the dog warned the other woman that she had a gun.
The other woman told her to call the police. The woman with the gun called the police and informed them that she had a gun in a holster on her hips.
By the time JSO arrived at the scene around 2:30 p.m., the women could still be heard yelling.
The police separated the two, detaining one woman.
Officer Milan Jones attempted to get to the woman with her child and her dog but the dog lunged at Jones, biting him on his left leg.
Jones fired three shots at the dog and a fragment of something ricocheted and struck the woman in the shin area of her left leg. It’s unclear if she was hit by a piece of the bullet or something that was on the ground.
“It’s a small piece of fragment of something that could be part of the round. Could be something from the ground. We don’t know, but the hospital is not going to remove it because it’s, I guess it’s fairly small,” JSO said.
The dog was doing okay, police said. The woman was taken to the hospital, and the child was unharmed.