Walk in park becomes a dog owner's nightmare

By Tonya Maxwell and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah
Tribune staff reporters
Published February 20, 2007

Laura Mercer sobbed Monday evening in a downtown hotel room, remembering the sounds her beloved dog made in the long minutes before his death.

The dog lay near a fountain at the southern end of Grant Park Saturday evening, yelping and screaming, sounding as though he were being brutally stabbed, she recalled.

Instead, Smokey, a Labrador retriever mix, was electrocuted in what Chicago Park District officials are calling "a freak accident."

"I want to know how my best friend of nine years died the most horrible death in front of me," said a distraught Mercer, who was released Monday afternoon from Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She said she felt emotionally unable to return home.

"What if this had been a little kid and it was a 5-year-old who put his mitten on the ground and died? I don't want anyone else to have this kind of pain."

Park District spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner said the dog stepped on an access panel in the ground along a raised asphalt walkway or promenade east of Michigan Avenue, near 8th Street.

An electrical wire within the access panel had shorted out, she said, and when the dog stepped on the panel Saturday evening, he was fatally shocked.

Chicago police said Monday they were investigating the death of a second dog that died in similar circumstances. But investigators have determined there was no second death, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said today.

Mercer, 30, was hospitalized for shock and for bites inflicted by Smokey. Her husband, Matthew Mock, was out of town at the time of the incident and joined her at the hospital.

"You can prepare yourself that one day you might have to put a dog down, but with this, all her good memories of Smokey have been replaced by this," Mock said.

The route Mercer and Smokey took Saturday in Grant Park was one they had walked innumerable times. They left their condominium at 11th Street and Michigan Avenue about 5:30 p.m. for an evening walk and a quick trip to a dog-friendly video store.

About two blocks away, near 8th Street in Grant Park, Smokey yelped and lifted a paw, Mercer said. She thought the salt or snow was bothering him, maybe a rock.

Then, the 60-pound dog began howling and Mercer said she thought Smokey was having a seizure. She reached for him and he bit her right hand. She pulled away and his teeth grabbed her back left leg, ripping her jeans.

She called an emergency veterinarian clinic on her cell phone and a woman said the dog must be having a seizure and he would calm soon. Then Smokey slumped forward, Mercer said.

She said she then knelt down.

"I was trying to see if he was breathing or if he was dead. I put my fingers down to steady myself and I noticed my fingers tingling. I could feel it moving up through my hands and arms and my legs. It was a kind of a humming," she said, realizing that electricity was flowing from the ground.

She saw another man walking toward her with a dog and she heard the animal yelp.

"I screamed at the man to get out of there, it was going to kill his dog as well," she said, crying at the memory.

In all, Mercer said she believes the ordeal lasted 15 minutes before Smokey died.

She insists that her dog was on asphalt during most of the incident, about 5 feet from the panel Park District officials blame in the death.

The dangers of stray voltage gained national attention after the death of Jodie Lane in New York City in 2004.

She collapsed in slushy, bitter weather in the East Village as she walked her dogs and was electrocuted.

Grant Park Conservancy President Bob O'Neill said he is concerned because the park has been trying to attract dogs and dog-owners with a new dog park.

"When something like this happens, people feel nervous," O'Neill said. "We don't want another reason for dog walkers to feel unwelcomed in Grant Park."