ohmidog!

A Memphis police officer remains hospitalized after being struck last week by a shotgun blast intended for a dog.

Officer Willie Bryant is a member of a multi-jurisdictional gang  task force that was serving a drug-related warrant at a  home in north Memphis.

He was wearing a bulletproof vest when the shot — intended for a Cane Corso police said was charging at officers — struck him in the back last Thursday.

Two men inside the home were arrested and charged with possessing a handgun during attempted commission of a felony, and possessing crack cocaine and marijuana with intent to sell.

The dog, along with three others, were later picked up by Memphis Animal Services.

When police entered the home, two dogs — a pit bull and a Cane Corso — were inside, James Rogers, administrator of Memphis Animal Services, told the Commercial Appeal. The Corso was loose and the pit bull was in a kennel.

Police say the loose dog charged at them, leading officer Byron Willis to fire his weapon. The dog was not struck, and apparently, after the shot was fired, didn’t cause problems requiring officers to use lethal force .

That dog, the pit bull, and two more Cane Corsos in the backyard of the property were taken in by animal control.

Bryant, 32, who has been on the force for nine years, was rushed to a hospital, where he remains in critical condition. Willis, 43, who has been with the force since July, was been placed on leave pending an investigation.

During a search of the home, officers found crack cocaine, three body armor vests, and five handguns, police said.

“Dogs, armed parties, you never know what you are going to encounter when you kick a door in,” Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong said. “We have to make life or death decisions, not only about our lives, but about other people’s lives, in less than a second’s notice.”

Name: Sonny Barger

Breed: Hell’s Angel

Age: 72

Encountered: At The Buffalo Chip, a bar and restaurant in Cave Creek, Arizona

Backstory: Sonny (at right, that’s me on the left) was a founding member of the Hell’s Angels, helping establish the Oakland, California, chapter of the club in 1957.

I ran into him this week after I stopped to buy a cowboy hat.

“Those are Hell’s Angels,” the parking lot cowboy hat salesman told me, pointing out the five motorcycles lined up outside of a bar and restaurant called The Buffalo Chip.

“Yeah, right,” I thought, and possibly said out loud. While I’ve seen thousands of motorcyclists descend on Cave Creek in my brief time here — most of them right next door to my trailer park at a place called The Hideaway — they are mostly stockbrokers and accountants and the like, who transform into bikers on the weekend.

“No, this is the real deal,” said my roadside haberdasher. “Sonny Barger is in there.”

Ralph Hubert “Sonny” Barger just so happens to be a founding member of the Hell’s Angels.

So, leaving Ace in the car, I walked in, rudely interrupted a conversation he was having and asked if I could take his picture.

Barger shook my hand and said he could do better than that. “I have a photographer with me.” He called over one of the members of a crew from Fox Movies, in town to scout out locations for a movie based on his autobiography. I handed  the photographer my camera and he took the photo at the top of this post. (So, if you don’t like it, Sonny, blame him.)

I apologized to Barger for not taking my newly purchased cowboy hat off, and explained to him that it had just been dipped in water and was forming to the exact size of my head. Barger was polite and accommodating, and he told me that the movie was something he’d been hoping to get done for 10 years. Now, it appears, it’s going to happen.

Barger was a prominent figure in Hunter S. Thompson’s bestselling book, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. He’s also mentioned in Tom Wolfe’s best seller, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

He has shown up in movies, too. He appeared in “Hells Angels on Wheels,” and was one of several members of the motorcycle club (I think they prefer the word club to gang) who had cameo speaking parts in “Hell’s Angels ’69.” Just last month he made a short guest appearance on “Sons Of Anarchy,” the television series about a fictional outlaw motorcycle club, based on the Hell’s Angels.

Altogether, Barger has spent about 13 years of his life behind bars, four of those for conspiring to blow up the clubhouse of a rival motorcycle club, the Outlaws, in Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1983, Barger was diagnosed with throat cancer, suspected to be connected to smoking three pack of Camels a day for 30 years. He underwent surgery, smoking a cigarette, it is said, on his way to the operating room. His vocal cords were removed, but he learned to speak again using the muscles in his throat. When he talks, he holds a finger over the hole in his neck.

In more recent years, he has become an author, and his books include Freedom: Credos from the Road, Dead in 5 Heartbeats, 6 Chambers, 1 Bullet and his 2001 autobiography,  Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club. In recent years Barger has worked to promote motorcycle safety, co-authoring The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Motorcycles and, in 2010, Let’s Ride: Sonny Barger’s Guide to Motorcycling.

Barger is a resident of Cave Creek and remains an active member of the Hells Angels Cave Creek Chapter.

(To see all of our Roadside Encounters, click here, or visit travelswithace.com)

His own dog’s DNA helped convict a reputed gang member in south London of the murder of a 16-year-old.

Oluwaseyi Ogunyemi was killed in a “vicious” attack by a gang of youths who set upon him and his friends with their dogs. One of the dogs,  a Staffordshire bull terrier-bull mastiff cross called Tyson, brought Ogunyemi down as he tried to climb over a fence, after which the youth was stabbed six times by its owner Chrisdian Johnson.

Johnson was arrested as he fled the scene of the murder last April, bare-chested and covered in blood.

New DNA technology proved by a billion-to-one probability that some of the blood on Johnson came from his dog Tyson, who had been knifed during the fighting. The rest came from Ogunyemi.

Johnson was also found guilty of the attempted murder of Seyi’s 17-year-old friend Hurui Hiyabum, whom he stabbed nine times.

Scientists used DNA profiling to prove that samples collected during the investigation were a billion times more likely to come from two specific dogs involved in the attack than any other animals, the BBC reported.

Police  hailed the dog DNA technology, which had just been developed at the time of the murder, as a “hugely powerful investigative tool”.