Kathleen Ann Taylor (Escambia County Sheriff’s Office)
A 35-year-old Florida woman has been arrested after three dogs she allegedly owns viciously attacked and killed a 63-year-old man who was walking in the area.
Kathleen Ann Taylor was taken into custody on Monday and charged with one count of homicide — negligent manslaughter, a second-degree felony, authorities announced.
According to Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons, deputies responded to a call about an unresponsive adult male on a property in the 400 block of Norris Avenue at around 10 p.m. on Feb. 24, 2023.
“A 63-year-old male was found with injuries to his head and torso. He was pronounced deceased due to these injuries,” Simmons said during a Monday news conference announcing Taylor’s arrest. “The man lived in a trailer on the same property, and it appears that three dogs attacked him and ultimately took his life. The owner of the property and the dogs is Kathleen Taylor, and right now, she is in jail.”
Simmons said that Taylor “failed to properly secure her home or her kennels, or any other enclosure designed to keep her dogs from roaming free.”
He also noted that despite Taylor having a history of problems with Escambia County Animal Control agents and being fined several times for allowing her animals to roam freely, she still failed to take any action to address the housing of her animals.
Regarding the three dogs that allegedly attacked the victim — whose name has not been released — authorities say that multiple people in the neighborhood had filed complaints that the dogs had chased them and posed a serious threat to the community.
“We have a lot of roaming calls. We call them nuisance calls, where the animals may have been chasing people and things like that,” Escambia Animal Services Manager John Robinson said during the news conference. “She doesn’t have the proper housing and obviously doesn’t have the proper care for them.”
One of Taylor’s friends told her that she had to get rid of the dogs after one of the animals recently bit the friend, the sheriff’s office said.
According to a copy of the probable cause affidavit obtained by Mobile, Alabama, CBS affiliate WKRG-TV, when deputies arrived at the scene of the attack, they found the victim lying on the ground “with both ears detached, along with his nose and left eye detached.”
He also had several bites on each of his arms that were bleeding.
A witness who was with the victim told deputies the three dogs approached them at around 10 a.m. and surrounded the man, and began grunting before they attacked, WKRG reported.
The witness reportedly told investigators that Taylor was at the scene and “screamed” that the dogs did not belong to her before getting in her car and driving away.
“The bottom line is this: if you have a pet, you have a responsibility to secure those animals. If you have any reason to think that your dogs are dangerous, you have an even stronger responsibility to make sure that the people around those dogs are safe,” Simmons said. “Kathleen Taylor, she chose to have a pet, she chose to take on that responsibility, and she failed in that responsibility, and now a man is dead. What a tragedy.”
The sheriff also emphasized that the ordeal could have been avoided if Taylor had simply taken the measures a “reasonable person would have taken” to secure her dogs in kennels.
Taylor is being held in Escambia County Jail without bond, jail records show. If convicted of the negligent manslaughter charge, Taylor faces up to 15 years in prison.
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