'My three-year mission to track down dog which mauled me as Mirror praised by judge'

'My three-year mission to track down dog which mauled me as Mirror praised by judge' Associate Editor Tom Bryant on the incredible three-year legal fight after he was viciously mauled in the street by an out of control dog For the last three years, every dog walk has been more or less the same. My eyes are forever darting down side streets, or across the road. If I hear something running up behind me, my stomach lurches. There was no rational reason to be afraid. The dog which viciously attacked me in 2023 had been seized and could no longer come bounding around a corner. But the psychological scars of that awful evening, which left me in hospital, stayed with me long after my own wounds healed. Now, at last, it feels like I can finally begin to enjoy my daily dog walk in peace. Last week the dog's owner Pandora Sause, 63, failed in her appeal to overturn a 12 -week prison sentence, suspended for 12 months, for allowing it to attack me. She also failed to overturn an order banning her from keeping dogs for ten years. When the police witness care officer told me the news, I felt a sudden lightness. In the initial weeks after the attack when the police didn’t return my calls, I wondered whether anyone would ever find her, or her dog. In the end, I took matters into my own hands. After a lengthy investigation, I located the woman - and discovered other attacks her dog had carried out. And when the case eventually reached court, District Judge Matt Jabbitt made a point of recognising the rather unusual way it had got there. “Mr Bryant should be commended for the efforts he made to trace the defendant,” he said. After such a long wait for the case to reach its conclusion, those words meant a lot. My ordeal began just five minutes from my home in Harringay as I gave my Shih Tzu Monty his usual 6.30pm walk. A red-haired woman was riding a bicycle towards us on the pavement with her black mastiff-type dog running off lead ahead of her. The animal - a mass of hulking muscle - initially growled and lunged at Monty, so I quickly crossed the road and began walking away. Then suddenly the dog darted across the busy road. I scooped Monty up as it smashed into my stomach, winding me, before biting his leg. Kicking the dog away gave me enough time to hold Monty above a wall, but the mastiff began jumping almost to head height before sinking its teeth deep into my arm. Eventually the woman caught up with her dog and mumbled an apology as my blood poured onto the pavement. I called my wife Liz but couldn’t get the words out. She ran to find me, counted nine puncture wounds on my forearm, wrapped my arm in a tea towel and drove me to A&E. There I was given a tetanus injection and antibiotics while doctors X-rayed my arm to check that fragments of the dog’s teeth had not become embedded inside it. Monty, thankfully, escaped with little more than a graze. The ordeal was made worse by the fact that two and half weeks after the attack, my calls and emails to police went unanswered despite clear CCTV I’d recovered of the attack. It was then I decided to write about it in the Mirror ….and had a breakthrough. It began with a comment under a Mirror TikTok video of my attack suggesting the woman lived in a particular part of Islington. I worked out the nearest park, searched local Facebook groups and found details of another attack involving a similar-sounding dog. I started messaging people and within minutes, someone recognised the woman in my CCTV.Then another person did, and before long I had her name, her address and a photograph of the dog. More worryingly, I had also started finding other people who said they too had been attacked by the same animal. One of them even ended up in the same local A&E as me. “It was horrific, I just remember two men having to pull the dog back and my arm pouring with blood,” she told me. “Before this I used to really enjoy walking the dog but now I hate it…it’s had a deep psychological impact on me to be honest. It should never have happened to you too, especially all these months after mine.” Another woman had been bitten in a separate attack. Her dachshund disappeared for 20 minutes afterwards before being found cowering in a Tesco with two puncture wounds. “When I am on a walk now, I keep looking behind me, or around corners,” she told me. “We shouldn’t be living in fear but it has definitely affected me.” Both had reported the attacks to the police but there had been no progress before the same dog was allowed to attack me. I continued digging and began speaking to people living near the address I had been given. Some told me they had been frightened of the dog for months and that repeated complaints had been made to the council. One resident recalled seeing a woman jumping over his gate to get away from it. “It goes after everyone and is making everyone’s lives a misery, but nothing is being done,” they told me. By then I was pretty certain I had found the right woman, but I wanted to know for sure. So one Monday morning I stood outside her flat waiting for what I assumed would be the first dog walk of the day. Nobody appeared but I returned later that afternoon and knocked instead. When the door opened, I recognised her immediately from the CCTV. “Your dog attacked me two weeks ago and I ended up in hospital,” I said. “Do you have anything to say? Why don’t you keep your dog on a lead?” There was a long silence. “That’s a terrible thing, I am very sorry to hear it, but I can’t help you… I have nothing to say to you,” she replied, before closing the door. It would be a long road to court but when we eventually got there (and by this stage the police were brilliant), Sause was charged with two counts of being in charge of a dog dangerously out of control causing injury. Prosecutor Edward Kalber summed up what had happened rather neatly. “This defendant has zero control over her dog,” he said. “Mr Bryant did his own investigation. He spoke to local community members. He identified the defendant as being the one who owned the dog. She was subsequently spoken to by the police.” The court heard that before attacking me Sause had insisted her pet was “just a service dog who wants to sniff”. Judge Jabbitt was rather less convinced by her ownership of the animal. He said the case showed “the strongest possible signs of irresponsible dog ownership”, adding: “The court’s primary concern has to be public safety.” Ruling that there had been “significant harm” to me and the other victim, he concluded: “I accept that dogs are important to the defendant. But the degree of irresponsibility shown leads me to the conclusion that she is not a fit and proper person to have ownership of a dog.” As well as being banned from keeping a dog for ten years, a destruction order was imposed on the animal. I take no pleasure from the prospect of any dog being destroyed and neither did the other victim who rightly pointed out in her impact statement, there was “no such thing as bad animals, only irresponsible owners”. During the court case, the prosecuter said how I angrily told the woman at the time: "Put your dog on a f****** lead." I'd forgotten that particular detail. But three years on, we wouldn't be in this mess if she had.