Amber King knew almost nothing about the man who asked her for a favor.
He was moving out of his apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco and needed someone to watch his pit bull for a while. King, a homeless woman who was waiting for housing from the city, agreed without thinking twice. She tied the dog to a post on Larkin Street. She couldn’t explain how, but the animal got loose and lunged at her.
For 10 to 15 minutes, the pit bull pinned her against the pavement while she used her arms as a shield. “She was going to die. If she didn’t fight, she was going to die. She couldn’t stop hearing the crunch of the dog’s bites”, she told ABC7. A passerby named Ashley tried to scare the animal away before a police officer managed to control it with a catch pole. The dog, covered in blood, collapsed and died in the middle of the street.
King spent a week hospitalized at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and needed multiple surgeries: every nerve and every bone in her left hand is damaged. To this day, the pit bull’s owner has not been identified or held responsible for what happened.
