I love the Spork story.
It had everything — drama, bit lips and blood, crying, bickering attorneys, judges taking rulings under advisement, and nearly 24,000 people signing up on a Facebook page to follow its every turn and twist.
You knew from its first telling that Spork, a 10-year-old miniature dachshund, was hardly vicious. His owners took him to their Lafayette veterinarian because he was in pain from a bad tooth.
Bottom line: In a spasm of fear and pain, Spork bit off pieces of technician Allyson Stone’s lips.
City prosecutors later charged Tim and Kelly Walker, the dog’s owners. Spork was facing, worst case, the executioner’s needle.
That possible fate explains the 24,000 people. Among them were many retired and working vets, technicians and assorted other animal handlers who wrote that techs who put themselves in a position to be bitten fairly deserve it.
It is what happens when a tiny brown wiener dog has its life on the line.
You get TV news cameras, a clutch of reporters and interested others standing inside and outside the courtroom jockeying to learn its fate.
“I have never, ever seen anything like this,” said Jennifer Edwards, an attorney and the owner of the Animal Law Center in Wheat Ridge who represented the Walkers.
It was, of course, a ridiculously shortsighted prosecution from the outset. It just took the parties a while to figure this out.
Giving Spork a six-month deferred prosecution was not the idea of the Walkers or their counsel. No, the city proposed the idea more than a week ago. The city, in the end, wanted Spork and the whole image-battering matter to go away.
More than anything, the Spork saga revealed how sadly disconnected we really are in this hyper-wired, electronically connected, 2 4/7 digital age we often celebrate.
How easy it is for thousands of people to sit at home on the computer, and turn good and otherwise well-meaning folks into villains, never once having to stand and look them in the face, to witness their pain.
Online, Allyson Stone was a modern Cruella De Vil, some mean and heartless character seeking vengeance on a poor dog to mask her own failings.
In real life she is a sweet, soft-spoken young woman, who nervously told Municipal Court Judge Roger Buchholz she brought charges only to protect other technicians, maybe even children, from having to go through “the disfiguring and the emotional pain I went through.”
She was perfectly fine with the court deal, she said. And no, she added, she never wanted Spork euthanized.
One last thing still haunts, though. It was a question that was asked of Tim and Kelly Walker after the hearing.
Could they possibly see now a way to apologize to Stone, who still must undergo one more surgery to repair her face?
Tim Walker fielded it, the young woman standing only a few feet away. He stammered some, twisted with his hands in his pockets.
“We have suffered a lot in this too, because of this charge,” he said, never really answering the question. “We feel an apology is owed to us, as well.”
Sometimes, no matter the outcome, I suppose, there can be no happy endings.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, the column incorrectly described the disposition of the vicious-dog case against the owners of a dachshund named Spork. The case was resolved in Lafayette Municipal Court with a deferred prosecution.
