A Los Angeles woman was celebrating the New York Knicks' NBA championship win on Saturday night, screaming with joy, when her neighbors called the cops. The cops came. And then they shot her dog. The dog's name was Jameson. He was a Golden Saint Berdoodle. He did not get to see the trophy.
What Actually Happened That Night
According to the New York Post, LAPD officers responded to a condominium complex on Jordan Avenue in Canoga Park on Saturday after neighbors reported hearing a woman screaming inside her unit. Police believed it could be a domestic violence incident. It was not. The woman, Marie Marseille, was watching the Knicks close out the NBA championship and losing her mind about it, the way a person does when their team wins a title for the first time in decades.
When officers arrived and spoke with Marseille, they determined she was not in danger. This is the part of the story worth holding onto, because everything that followed happened after the cops already knew there was no emergency. Marseille briefly closed her door, her dog Jameson slipped out, and the LAPD says the dog then 'charged' at officers. One officer opened fire. Jameson was killed.
Neighbors described the aftermath as chaos. Cellphone footage captured Marseille screaming in the moments after the shooting. 'We were just so happy. We were just so happy. We were just celebrating the Knicks. We were f---ing celebrating the Knicks,' she can be heard crying. Her neighbor across the street, Raymon Alvarez, told ABC7 that the screaming after the gunshot was something else entirely. 'The screaming I heard was like, just pure screaming,' he said.
The Part Where This Gets Worse
Here is the thing about this story that keeps pulling at you. The officers had already established that Marie Marseille was safe. No crime. No victim. No emergency. The call was over before it became a tragedy.
Najee Ali, Senior Organizer of the Los Angeles National Action Network, made this exact point at a press conference outside LAPD headquarters on Tuesday morning, as Fox 11 reported. 'All they had to do was turn around and leave,' Ali said. 'Instead, we now have a beloved dog killed by LAPD.' That is a pretty simple sequence of events. Officers confirm the situation is fine. Officers stay anyway. Dog dies.
The LAPD's official position is that Jameson charged at the officer, making the shooting a defensive act. That may be true. It is also true that none of this happens if the officers leave when the call is resolved. These two things can coexist, and the department's internal review is not going to make anyone feel better about the gap between them.
Activists Want the Footage and They Want It Now
The Los Angeles chapter of the National Action Network held a press conference Tuesday demanding that the LAPD immediately release body camera footage from the incident and publicly identify the officers involved. As of Tuesday night, the department had done neither. The shooting remains under internal review, which is a phrase that has covered a lot of ground in LAPD history.
'The tragic killing of Jameson was unnecessary and unwarranted,' Ali said, according to the New York Post. 'We demand immediate accountability, which can only happen through the prompt release of the body-worn camera footage and the names of the officers responsible.' He also connected this incident to a longer pattern, saying, 'Unfortunately, LAPD has a long history of controversial shootings of Black people in LA. Now they're killing Black people's dogs, and that dog had every right to live, just as you and I.'
The National Action Network has spent years pushing the LAPD on body camera policies, special prosecutors in police-shooting cases, and anti-racial-profiling efforts. The demand for footage transparency is not new. What is new is a dead Golden Saint Berdoodle named after a whiskey, owned by a woman who was committing the crime of being too loud about basketball.
The Internet Has Opinions and Also $150,000
A GoFundMe set up in Jameson's memory has raised nearly $150,000 as of Tuesday night, according to the New York Post. The original goal was $10,000. That gap tells you something about how this story landed online, where people who may not have strong views on LAPD accountability policy still have very strong views about dogs and about the specific absurdity of this sequence of events.
It is worth being honest about what that money means and does not mean. It does not bring Jameson back. It does not answer the questions about body camera footage or officer conduct. What it does do is signal that this story has broken out of the local news cycle and into the kind of national attention that tends to make police departments suddenly discover an interest in releasing information faster than they otherwise would.
Whether the LAPD responds to that pressure remains to be seen. Their track record on voluntary transparency is not exactly a highlight reel.
The Dingo Take
Let's just sit with the basic facts for a second. A woman watches her team win a championship. She screams, like a human being. Her neighbors, apparently having never witnessed sports joy before, call the police to report a woman in distress. The police come. The police confirm she is not in distress. The police stay. The dog gets shot. This is not a complicated story. It is a story about a series of decisions, each of which made the next one worse, culminating in a dead family pet and a woman screaming in her parking lot about the Knicks.
The body camera footage exists. It was rolling on officers who had already confirmed there was no emergency. The LAPD knows exactly what is on it, and the fact that they have not released it does not inspire confidence that what is on it makes the department look good. Maybe it shows a genuinely terrifying charge from a very large dog. Maybe it shows something else. The only way to know is to release the footage, which is the entire point of body cameras, which the city spent considerable money equipping officers with precisely for situations like this one.
Jameson was a Golden Saint Berdoodle, which is a Golden Retriever mixed with a Saint Bernard, which means he was approximately the size of a very friendly couch. Marie Marseille loved him. She was celebrating something joyful when this happened. The LAPD owes her, and the public, a straight answer about what its officers did after they already knew she was fine. That is not a radical demand. That is the absolute minimum.
