ohmidog!

Cool Hand Luke, a chocolate Lab, was shot and killed by police officers responding to a burglar alarm in Georgia.

His owner wants an apology.

“I don’t want anything else out of this,” said Robby King of Smyrna. “This is life changing for me. Luke was such a big part of my life and I didn’t realize what all I did with him until now.”

The 6-year-old chocolate lab was shot by a Cobb County police officer Sunday, according to the Marietta Daily Journal.

A spokesman for the Cobb County Police Department told the newspaper that, while he could not discuss the incident, the two officers involved “followed proper protocol.”

King, 45, says he accidentally triggered the burlgar alarm at his home Sunday afternoon, and couldn’t remember the password required to turn it off.

Two Cobb County police officers, identified as  J.P. Gibson and G. M. Roach, responded.

Roach, in his report, said that when he opened the back door of the home and announced he was a police officer a “large brown dog” came running toward him, “barking aggressively.”

According to his report — and we’ll admit to not understanding this part – he didn’t close the door because it would have put him in “immediate risk of danger from the unknown that was inside the residence.”

He continues: “While quickly retreating out of the patio, the large brown dog continued to charge toward me in an aggressive manner while continuously barking at me as he advanced on me. The large dog closed the distance between me and him in less than three seconds. I fired one round at the large dog and it continued charging me in an aggressive manner as if the dog’s main focus was attacking and harming me. I fired one more round at the large dog and it immediately collapsed falling to its left side in the grass.”

Did he mention it was a large dog?

Gibson’s report described things more briefly: ”A dog began to bark and came at Officer Roach. Officer Roach shot the dog.”

King says he never heard the officers announce their presence.

“… I heard Luke bark and I said, ‘Luke come,’ as I was headed through the house … I heard a pop, pop and as I was headed out the door, I said, ‘Oh God, please don’t shoot my dog,’ and Luke was laying there, gasping for air.”

King said Luke always barked when someone was at the door.

“… If the officer had just stopped, Luke would have gone up to him and just sniffed him and probably would have gone and gotten a ball to fetch. I know the (officer) didn’t know that, but my point is that he didn’t have to shoot my dog. He could have shot up in the air, maced him, kicked him, whatever he wanted to do. He wouldn’t have bit him.”

Police also said they were told by a neighbor that Luke had bitten her.

The neighbor, though, who is also King’s sister, told the Daily Journal that police apparently misunderstood her. She said she told them she’d recent been bitten by another dog, a Chihuahua.

“The reason I said that was because I was trying to point out to them that this little dog bit me and Luke never even bit nobody,” she said.

King, who adopted Luke when the dog was six months old, buried him near the garden in his backyard late Sunday night.

“I haven’t been able to stop crying. This was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” he said.

(Photo by Todd Hull / Marietta Daily Journal)