Dog breaks free and kills toddler as parents leave 8 kids home alone, Texas cops say
An 11-year-old girl was left in charge of seven other children when a dog broke out of its kennel and killed a toddler, Texas police say.
Now a Wichita Falls couple, Deidre Wheeler and her husband Lacharles Ramsey, are facing charges and were arrested on Monday, Jan. 27 — nearly a month after the fatal Dec. 29 attack, according to court documents filed in Wichita County.
McClatchy News reached out to an attorney representing Wheeler but didn’t immediately hear back. No attorney information was available for Ramsey.
On the evening of the attack, Wichita Falls police received a 911 call “that a child had been attacked by a Pitbull and … the child was bleeding badly and was non-responsive,” documents read.
The toddler was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead within an hour of the 911 call, investigators said.
Wheeler told police she had been watching the toddler and the toddler’s 8-month-old sibling, as well as six other children at the home ranging in age from 6 to 11 years old.
The toddler and 8-month-old weren’t Wheeler’s kids, but she had agreed to babysit them after dropping their mother off at work that morning, according to police.
Wheeler said she was home when the dog burst from its kennel and that she acted quickly to get the 8-month-old to safety, then pulled the dog off the toddler with help from her husband, documents read. It was all a blur, she told police.
“She stated she couldn’t remember how the dog got out because it happened so fast,” according to investigators.
However, police say the reason Wheeler couldn’t remember is because she wasn’t there, and neither was her husband.
Her story started to unravel the day after the mauling, when police got a call from a CPS investigator who was tipped off that “neither Ramsey nor his wife were home when this incident happened.”
The CPS investigator interviewed the children and learned that Wheeler and Ramsey had left the home to take their 16- and 19-year-old daughters to an event, documents read. They put the next oldest, their 11-year-old daughter, in charge of the seven other kids at the home while they were gone.
Later on, “the 11-year-old started to fix dinner for the children and had called her mom to see when she would be back because the children were getting out of control,” documents said. “During this conversation, the dog then broke out of the kennel and they grabbed the 8-month-old but the dog then bit and attacked the 2-year-old.”
The attack continued until Wheeler and Ramsey made it home and got the toddler away from the dog, according to investigators.
The children also told investigators this wasn’t an isolated incident, that a year earlier the dog had escaped from the kennel and bitten their 5-year-old brother.
Wheeler and Ramsey were arrested on multiple counts of endangering and abandoning a child, records show. Wheeler also faces one count of injury to a child, and her bond is set at $450,000, while Ramsey’s is $300,000.
The dog has been euthanized, KFDX reported.
Wichita Falls is a 115-mile drive northwest from Fort Worth.
This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 11:34 AM with the headline "Dog breaks free and kills toddler as parents leave 8 kids home alone, Texas cops say."