Tragedy at Lynchburg

The German Shepherd instinctively mistrusts strangers, and if provoked by them, will develop a ferocity hardly ever seen in other canine varieties. There is no doubt, despite all that has been written and said to the contrary, that the wolf did enter into the ancestry of the breed, and certain of that animal's characteristics are still found in its makeup, both mental and physical.

--The Dog Owner's Guide

The two Goodman brothers, aged 4 and 5, had hardly left their rural Virginia home to play in the woods one day last week before the elder, Gene, came back screaming "The dogs have got Kenny!"

With her son leading the way, Mrs. Gloria Goodman ran across the back yard, down a steep embankment to the edge of a small stream where the boys had been playing. Kenneth was nowhere in sight. But two snarling German shepherds and a stray boxer were. The dogs lunged. Mrs. Goodman kept them at bay with a rake, and Gene scrambled onto the limb of a fallen tree to escape their fanged jaws. "Don't let the dogs get me," he pleaded.

Gene shinnied along the limb until he was dangling about four feet above the stream. Thinking him safe, and unable to fend off the dogs, Mrs. Goodman ran back to the house and tele phoned her husband Eugene, 26, a self-employed exterminator who was working part time in a market at nearby Lynchburg. Goodman sped home in his pickup truck, found his wife hysterical and barely capable of pointing out to him the area where she had last seen Gene. Thrashing wildly down the hill and shouting his sons' names as he ran, Goodman was brought up short by a horrible sight. Gene, his clothes nearly all torn off and his body badly mangled, lay dead in the stream.

Fright & Madness. Out of the corner of his eye, Goodman noticed a shadowy movement. It was a dog that had been feeding on his son's body. Soon, two other dogs appeared, and Goodman found himself fighting for his life. Hoisting Gene's body over his shoulder, and using his free hand to throw rocks and branches at the attack ing animals, Goodman ran as fast as he could. As he neared his home, the dogs finally gave up the chase. Goodman was so overwrought and exhausted that he passed out. Later, a posse of about 50 neighbors and lawmen found the other boy. He had been dragged to an area about 200 yds. from where his brother died. His body was gnawed almost beyond recognition.

The two animals that led the attack were later identified as shepherds kept as watchdogs by a neighbor, Ernest George Floyd. Both animals were destroyed, as were three other dogs, one of them believed to be the stray boxer. What caused the attacks? Perhaps nothing more than a sudden move by one of the boys that may have frightened the dogs. Once the angry animals had tasted blood, they obviously became murderously maddened.

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