Dad is devastated after his daughter, 3, is killed by the pit bull he’d just adopted

A 3-year-old Oklahoma girl died on Sunday after the family’s newly adopted pit bull attacked her.

Rylee Marie Dodge had wanted to play with the dog outside the family’s home in Duncan, according to KFOR. She opened the front door, and the dog, which Rylee’s father had adopted five days earlier from a friend, attacked.

“I’m so sorry this happened to you baby girl,” Rylee’s father, Jason Dodge, wrote on Facebook. “I know I promised you I’d never let anything happen to you and I failed.”

Dodge received a phone call alerting him that the dog had attacked his daughter. He hurried back home and found his mother lying on top of the dog near his badly wounded daughter. He picked the girl up and placed her in a car, intending to rush her to a hospital. But before he left, an ambulance arrived.

“There’s nothing they could do — absolutely nothing,” Dodge told ABC 7.

When police arrived and the dog, which had run away, was contained, Dodge asked them to put it down.

“I was like, ‘Kill this dog, just shoot it down or I will.’ And he did. He shot it in the backyard,” Dodge said of the officer.

He had tried to introduce the dog to the family slowly by first only allowing his son to play with it. The dog hadn’t shown any signs of aggression before the attack, Dodge said.

“Miss you baby girl,” Dodge wrote on Facebook, adding he doesn’t know what he’ll do “without that beautiful smile and my kisses and hugs love you R.I.P. Rylee Marie.”

A GoFundMe page has been set up for funeral costs.

This story was originally published January 17, 2018 at 10:40 AM with the headline "Dad is devastated after his daughter, 3, is killed by the pit bull he’d just adopted."