Los Angeles police Friday released body cam footage of an officer killing a woman’s pet dog in a case that has sparked outrage and questions.

Jameson, a 2-year-old Saint Bernard doodle, was fatally shot by police on Saturday after police responded to a report of a woman screaming in her apartment in the 7500 block of Jordan Avenue at 8:55 p.m.

Footage of the shooting aftermath went viral and sparked outrage, showing the woman, Marie Marseille, sobbing over Jameson, who is wearing a Knicks shirt.

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The footage released by the LAPD on Friday shows the moments leading up to the heart-wrenching scene.

In the footage, which lasts a few minutes and comes from two body cameras, an officer is seen approaching the woman’s apartment door and declaring LAPD. A second officer stands slightly down the apartment complex passageway.

Marseille answers the door and the officer sees the large barking dog and says to her “can you put your dog away, please? Put your dog away.” Body cam video shows the second officer unholstering his gun, and backing away from the barking dog. He then puts his gun away after Marseille closes the door.

“Jeez, that is big ass dog,,” the first officer is heard exclaiming..

“I ain’t getting bit by that, bro,” the second officer says.

Marseille returns to the door and the officer again asks if she put away the dog. She replies, “it is not aggressive.”

An officer said, “he’s ah, huge, you know what I mean?”

At that point, Jameson comes past Marseille out the door away from the first officer, who tells her to “put him in.” A barking Jameson, however, moves down the passage toward the second officer, who draws his handgun in his right hand and shoots four times.

The large pup drops to the ground as Marseille screams: “No!”

The incident has sparked outrage and questions across the city, prompting Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell to promise a full investigation. The LAPD and Mayor Karen Bass face mounting political pressure to release the responding officers’ body camera footage of the shooting.

The release came after LAPD brass and top city leaders reviewed the footage and McDonnell conducted what is known as a 72-hour review of the officers’ action, the first step in a lengthy internal investigation process into shots being fired by an LAPD officer.

Amid mounting outcry, Bass offered a public tribute to the dog. “Every life lost to violence is a tragedy, and we know that the devastating loss of Jameson will be felt by his family forever.”

In an interview with NBC4, the neighbor who called police expressed remorse for making the call. She told the station after she heard screaming from Marseille’s apartment, she called out to her but did not get a response and so she called police, concerned for her neighbor’s welfare.

“I feel responsible for what happened,” the neighbor said, adding that the knocks on Marseille’s door sounded “hostile.”

“That’s not how I thought a wellness check would go,” she said.

In the viiral video after the shooting, neighbors can be heard angrily admonishing officers for killing the dog.

The incident has raised new questions about use-of-force protocols when it comes to dogs and whether reforms are needed.

In a statement after the shooting, McDonnell acknowledged Marseille’s loss.

“The loss of a pet is deeply personal. For many, a dog is not simply an animal; it is a companion, a source of comfort, and a member of the family,” the statement said. “LAPD officers face unknown dangers on a daily basis, but I expect them to exercise sound judgment, restraint, and respect for life whenever possible. That expectation is reflected in our training, policies, and specific guidance on encounters with dogs. All those factors will be carefully reviewed as part of this investigation.”

A GoFundMe has raised more than $200,000 for Marseille and her son.

Marseille told NBC4 that her family was celebrating the Knicks’ NBA Championship win when officers showed up.

“Next thing I know, he was on the ground,” Marseille said. “I see the officer shoot him twice. I did see that. I was right there when it happened.”

In a phone interview with The Times, her sister, Vanessa Marseille, said the family was shocked and devastated over the incident.

“We just don’t know why it happened,” she said. “What’s more scary is that those shots could have hit her or anyone. It was reckless.”

Marseille said her sister told her that she was closing the door when Jameson got out and was shot multiple times.

“It’s just tragic,” she said.

Marseille said her sister was born and raised in New York and left for California in 2014 for work. Two years ago, she said, her sister purchased Jameson, the oldest of seven puppies.

She said the pet was a constant presence when she talked with her nephew.

“Every time on FaceTime with Jeremiah, he’s always walking the dog,” she said. “When he takes my sister to work, Jameson is in the car, wagging his tongue.”

California, unlike Texas and Colorado, does not mandate canine encounter training for police officers. The LAPD issues a detailed guideline in the form of a bulletin to police officers. An attempt to mandate such training failed to get approved by state lawmakers in 2017.

LAPD Use of Force Directive No. 11 outlines the protocol for dog encounters.

According to the department’s directive written in 2023, officers should consider voice commands and several alternatives before using lethal force. The directive advises officers arriving at a scene to assess whether a dog may be present and reminds them their main concern upon arrival is “safety.”

The directive advises officers to remember all dogs can bite and then provides them a list of evolving options to deal with a “hostile” dog.

Officers can use voice commands, and if those don’t work options include pepper spray, a baton, a TASER or fire extinguisher, though some are more difficult to use on a fast moving animal, the directive says.

“A continuous reverse spin movement can deter an approaching animal,” the directive states. If necessary, a dog should be struck in the nose or throat, it adds.

Lethal force is allowed “when it’s reasonable to protect the officer or other person/s from an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.”

Officers are cautioned: “The size and speed of an animal can increase the potential of a missed shot and possibility of an officer or bystander being critically injured by a bullet.”

“Officers may not use lethal force against a dog to protect property including other animals,” the directive says.

Law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County have a track record of deadly incidents with dogs.

In 2013, Hawthorne police shot a dog four times after it jumped out of a vehicle as they detained its owner. In a video viewed more than 7 million times, the owner pleaded for officers not to shoot the dog.

In 2005, a Times investigation examining two decades of LAPD data found that one in four LAPD shootings targeted dogs. Police shot more than 465 dogs, killing at least 200 and wounding at least 140, incident reports revealed. However, in the latest year available, 2024, with tighter restrictions than in the past, one animal was shot by an officer.

According to LAPD department statistics, its officers have had 32 shootings with dogs since 2018, with the numbers reflecting a downward trend from 7 in 2018 to one last year.

A small lump of rock pulled up from the Pacific Ocean seafloor in 1976 is giving scientists new clues about an ancient cosmic event. More than a hundred million years ago, two neutron stars collided. The resulting energetic kilonova sent a rain of long-lived elements, such as isotopes of plutonium, through space. Eventually, this stellar “debris” settled onto Earth. Some sank to the bottom of the ocean and got incorporated into a chunk of ferromanganese rock. Hidden inside were a few hundred atoms of plutonium radioisotopes. They provide the strongest clues about what created them in the merger and how long ago it happened.

The plutonium is in the form of Pu-244, which has a half-life of 81.3 million years. That helped a team of scientists from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf institution in Germany and researchers at Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), put the epoch of the explosion a near 100 million years ago. They also found that the sample lacked another element related to the collision: curium 247. It has a half-life of 16 million years.

“The absence of the curium radioisotope Cm-247, which was also produced in the explosion, tells us it happened a very long time ago,” said ANSTO’s Dr. Michael Hotchkis. “But not more than about 1 billion years ago; otherwise the Pu-244 would also be undetectable.”

Research team member Dominic Koll holds a sample of the rocky crust recovered from the Pacific Ocean. Courtesy ANSTO.

Drilling Cores Reveal Elements from a Kilonova

To get to the hidden PU-244 and figure out the age of the neutron star merger debris, the science team drilled out three cores in the rock. Then they began a careful chemical analysis. The cores were dated using the beryllium isotope Be-10, which has a half-life of 1.5 million years. They also found traces of the iron isotope Fe-60 in one core. Earth’s crust grows so slowly that each core, measuring up to 3 cm, spanned more than ten million years.

The remaining crust was imaged with computed x-ray tomography and encased in resin. This allowed the scientists to cut thin layers that each corresponded to ~1 million years of growth. Then, each sample was divided up and processed to extract the plutonium. During this analysis, the team also found traces of material from known supernova events that occurred 2 and 7 million years ago. They also found some curium, but not the specific isotope that would have been created in the neutron star collision, according to Hotchkis. “The only possible explanation is that the cosmic explosion responsible for the plutonium happened so long ago that the curium has already decayed away to practically nothing,” he said.

Making Elements

We all know that elements such as helium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen — all the way up to iron — are made inside stars, a process called stellar nucleosynthesis. The Sun, for example, is fusing hydrogen in its core to make helium. In a few billion years, it will start to fuse helium to make carbon, and then continues on to make carbon and oxygen. When the Sun begins the transition to become a white dwarf, it will release all the elements to space. In stars much more massive than the Sun, the process is more complex, but basically, it continues up to the creation of iron. Since it takes more energy to make iron and anything heavier, the process stops, the core collapses and the star explodes all its elements to space. Elements such as gold, platinum, uranium, nickel, and zinc get created in such events.

About half the heaviest elements are made in colossal events such as neutron star collisions that result in kilonova events. That process is called the “r-process” and includes such elements as thorium and uranium, and transuranics, such as plutonium and curium. Theories of r-process nucleosynthesis suggest that both Cm-247 and Pu-244 are produced simultaneously, in roughly equal proportions in such an event. Since the curium decays more rapidly than the plutonium, that puts a lower bound on the age of the neutron star merger, while the Pu-244 helps define the upper bound.

*The periodic table of the elements with the origin of each element highlighted. Elements heavier than iron are created in supernovae, while some are created only in neutron star mergers. Courtesy Cmglee. CC BY-SA 3.0*

Exploring the R-process Dust on Earth and Beyond

The detailed study of these isotopes, plus others found in the ocean-bottom rock sample, show the debris from cosmic events can arrive at Earth in pulses. Some are linked to nearby supernova explosions. However, the tiny sample of Pu-244 existed throughout all layers of the rock slices. That means the plutonium very likely came from the neutron-star merger/kilonova. It has been showing up at Earth as a continuous flux throughout the 100 million years since the event.

The research team is looking for other samples to bolster the neutron-star merger discovery using radioisotope samples. There should be more pieces of ancient crust on Earth that contain the products of the r-process that occurred. The dust from that long-ago event could well have settled onto the Moon and other worlds. The Apollo rocks could be fair game for study, and future missions could provide another way to access dust from the ancient past.

Space-based missions such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope, and others have seen neutron star mergers in various wavelengths. So, scientists knew they took place. However, this “chemical analysis” of debris from such events is a big step forward in dating the events and observing the results of r-process nucleosynthesis.

An artist’s view of a neutron star merger, accompanied by two views taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. This type of event results in extremely high-energy conditions conducive to the creation of some of the heavier elements such as plutonium.

For More Information

Stardust, the Sea, and an Ancient Cosmic Collision

The Timing of the Last R-process Event Near Earth from Interstellar ⁶⁰Fe, ²⁴⁴Pu and ²⁴⁷Cm Deposition on Earth