On a warm July afternoon near South Grand, a pack of three bully-style pit-mixes tore into a St. Louis therapist and his small dog, leaving him stitched up, traumatized and staring down roughly $5,000 in medical debt. The victim, 29-year-old Slayden Figg, says his civil case later fizzled out, and with the bills now in collections and his trust in the city badly shaken, he is preparing to move away.
Figg says he was just a block from his Tower Grove East home on July 4 when the three unleashed dogs charged him and his Pomeranian-husky mix, Sonic, and “mauled us,” according to St. Louis Magazine. Witnesses told the magazine that driver Erin Braitberg-Barker pepper-sprayed the dogs while bystanders hustled Figg into a car. When an ambulance did not arrive, he drove himself to the hospital, where he needed stitches to his eyelids, nose and face. Figg says the remaining bills after insurance, about $5,000, are now in collections.
Following the attack, the city’s Animal Care & Control placed the dogs on a standard 10-day bite quarantine. A reported second attack on the final day of that quarantine led the department to begin dangerous-dog proceedings, as First Alert 4 reported. Public-health guidance supports that 10-day window to watch for rabies symptoms in biting dogs, and the Centers for Disease Control recommends confining and observing a biting dog for 10 days. Once an animal is declared dangerous, the label can trigger impoundment, strict housing requirements or euthanasia if the owner does not comply.
Figg later filed a civil suit against the dogs’ owner, identified in reporting as Ryan Alford, and Alford’s girlfriend. His attorney voluntarily dismissed the case after running into problems serving the defendants and learning the girlfriend did not have homeowners insurance, the magazine reported. Figg says those hurdles made a civil win unlikely, and that Alford told reporters he moved one of the dogs to St. Charles and sold another to someone in Texas. With no settlement or judgment to offset his expenses, Figg says he is trying to move on from the mauling while the medical debt and trauma follow him.
Legal roadblocks for victims
Civil claims after violent dog attacks can stall even when animal-control officers step in, because owners who are hard to find or who lack insurance limit what victims can realistically recover. First Alert 4 notes that dangerous-dog declarations are administrative tools. They can lead to impoundment and give owners 35 days to follow strict rules, but they do not directly provide any compensation for people who were bitten. Figg says that gap between public-health enforcement and civil remedies is exactly what left him paying his medical bills out of pocket.
Neighbors say the mauling has Tower Grove residents on edge and questioning whether the city’s options for dealing with risky dogs on sidewalks and front yards are strong enough. A string of severe attacks in St. Louis, including a deadly mauling earlier this year that led to the euthanasia of multiple dogs, has fueled similar outrage and difficult conversations about enforcement, as Spectrum News reported. Figg says he is thankful to be alive, but between the bills and the lingering fear, he is far less sure about the city he once loved.
