Heroes: Dog Attack Rescue

When two savage dogs attacked a defenseless four-year-old, Cody Phillips leaped first and looked later.

Staying home on a sunny Saturday afternoon wasn't the usual routine for Cody Phillips, but the amiable high school junior had promised to help clean out the garage of his Tulsa, Oklahoma, home. As he worked, he paid no attention to the dogs next door, who were raising a ruckus as usual -- but then his mother suddenly stopped to listen.

"I heard a child scream," Cody's mom, Shannon Ash, 39, remembers. "It was that kind of scream where you just know -- a mother's ear can tell -- that it's something serious." She ran next door, freezing at the savage scene unfolding behind the chain-link fence. Two dogs were mauling a little boy.

Cody heard his mother's blood-curdling cries for help. "I ran as fast as I could," he says. Without breaking stride, the five-nine former football player planted one hand on top of the six-foot fence and vaulted over. "It was pure adrenaline," he says.

The neighbor's pet pit bull and Shar-Pei were dragging four-year-old Zackery Miller across the yard, fighting over his small body. "One dog had Zack by the thigh, and the pit bull had his head clamped in its jaws," Cody says. He charged the snarling dogs, who dropped the bloodied child and ran off.

"I think I spooked them because I was running so fast," Cody says. But just as he reached Zack, the dogs circled back, ready to attack again. Instinctively, the teenager threw himself on top of the wounded boy.

"Cody!" his mother screamed. The dogs' owners weren't home, and from the other side of the fence, Shannon frantically shook a gate that was chained shut.

"I had so much adrenaline going through my body by then, I wasn't even scared," says Cody, who hopes to become a police officer or a firefighter one day. He felt weirdly calm as he lay facedown on the grass, sheltering Zack and waiting to see what the dogs would do next.

Hearing the commotion, Shannon's husband, Andy Ash, 40, raced outside and spotted his stepson on the ground. The couple pulled the gate off its hinges, then Andy grabbed a board and rushed between the growling dogs and the two trapped boys. The dogs retreated again, giving Cody time to sweep Zack into his arms and make a run for it. Cody was relieved to hear the preschooler begin wailing, "I want my mommy! I want my mommy!" The boy's head was bleeding, and one ear was nearly torn off. Blood gushed from deep bites on his arms and legs.

Cody's grandmother, Cy Taylor, had come out, too, and she took Zack from Cody's arms. Other neighbors had gathered and found a piece of pipe to bar the gate and keep the dogs in the yard.

"Cody just broke down and started shaking and crying," Shannon recalls. She held him close. "It's okay. It's okay now. You did great, son," she told him.

Still trembling, Cody knocked on the Miller family's door. Zack's mother, Dana, answered and immediately crumpled to her knees when she spotted Cody's grandmother comforting her bloodied son. "Oh my God!" she cried. "Zack!"

It was only at the hospital, where Zack spent nearly eight hours and received more than a hundred stitches, that Dana pieced together what had happened: Her child had slipped out to see if his best friend, who lives between the Millers' house and the Ashes', could play. When no one answered, Zack had wandered around back, to the fenced-in yard.

"He'd played many, many times with those dogs, and there was never a problem," Dana says. Zack doesn't remember what happened, but Shannon suspects the dogs must have dragged the 37-pound boy through a hole she noticed at the bottom of the fence.

"If we hadn't been outside," Shannon says, "that little boy would be dead. There's no question about it."

Zack recovered quickly enough to celebrate his fifth birthday a few days after the attack, with a party at the pizzeria where Cody works.

Animal control officers caught the pit bull, but the Shar-Pei was shot dead when it tried to attack them. The owners declined to take the pit bull back, "out of respect for us," Dana says, and the two families remain friends.

She finds it harder to forgive herself. Dana's voice chokes with tears when she thinks about the scream she didn't hear that day. "That's the hardest part for me," she admits. After getting home from the hospital late that night, she knocked on the Ashes' door. First she let everybody know that Zack was all right. Then she took Cody in her arms and hugged him, thanking him over and over again for saving her son's life. "I couldn't let him go," she says.

From Reader's Digest - August 2008

 

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• Save Your Own Life
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• PLUS:
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