A story out of Crawford County about an investigator who ordered a man to cut his dead dog's head off or face jail time has gone national.
Sites like The Daily Mail, Newsweek, The Sun, IB Times, 4chan and Reddit have all featured this graphic story out of Central Georgia.
An online petition calling on Crawford County Sheriff Lewis Walker to fire Inv. James Hollis has gained almost 170,000 signatures within the last two weeks.
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On Dec. 1, Joe Goodwin got a call to come home after his dog Big Boy bit a neighbor.
When officers arrived to investigate the complaint, the dog ran towards investigators and was fatally shot.
Once Goodwin got home, he began to record his interaction with the officers.
In part of the video, a man who identified himself as investigator James Hollis said, “We’re asking you to remove the dog’s head and you’re refusing, right?”
Hollis told him he had to remove his dog’s head to test it for rabies -- or go to jail. Goodwin says he refused at first -- but obeyed the officer.
“I removed my dog’s head and I put it in some Kroger bag and I showed the officer, ‘Here’s the head, this is what you wanted, right?’”, said Goodwin.
Sheriff Walker told WMAZ that one of his investigators should not have ordered Goodwin to cut the head off his dead dog.
He said, as he understands it, his officers should not play any role in investigating whether the dog was rabid. That issue should have been turned over to the county's health department.
Hollis is currently on administrative leave.
Walker says the incident is still under investigation and there is currently no timetable for when it will be completed.
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Goodwin's story also quickly spread across social media around the world, prompting fact-checking website Snopes to put up a story verifying the claims with WMAZ as a source.