HARTFORD, Conn. — A firefighter used a baseball bat to stop two pit bulls from attacking a woman and her dog.
Firefighter Nicole Mercado was woken up by the sound of a woman screaming at about 5 a.m. Tuesday. She grabbed a metal baseball bat from her home and ran towards the noise.
The off-duty firefighter saw a shrieking woman curled up into a ball, defending herself and a puppy in her arms from two attacking pit bulls.
Mercado swung at the dogs with the bat, but told NBC Connecticut that the dogs “just kept gnawing” at the woman, biting her ankles, chin and fingers.
The dogs only left after a neighbor who heard the commotion threw something at them.
Mercado looked after the woman until paramedics arrived. She was injured, but more worried about the service dog she had tried to protect from being attacked.
“She kept saying ‘mi perrito, mi perrito’,” Mercado recalls the victim saying about her puppy. “Like ‘my dog, my dog’.”
The victim’s daughter said the woman was protecting her dog from getting hurt by the pit bulls, but it did not survive.
The woman was treated at the hospital and released the same day, but returned to receive treatment for a leg injury.
Police have quarantined the pit bulls and are searching for the owners.