Dog Mauled Owner to Death as Owner was being Interviewed

from TheGuardian:

A dog that mauled its owner to death while he was being interviewed by a BBC film crew had attacked him before, a neighbour said.

The man, named locally as Mario Perivoitos, 41, was with the film crew at his home in Wood Green on 20 March when his Staffordshire bull terrier attacked, biting him in the neck.

The crew called an ambulance shortly before 10.30pm and the man was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead two hours later, the Metropolitan police confirmed.

A neighbour who gave his name as Tayfun said on Wednesday that the dog had previously attacked Perivoitos. “There were one or two previous occasions when the dog attacked,” he said. “Six or seven months ago the dog bit him on the leg. We heard him shout at the dog and he came running out with blood on his leg.”

Despite this, he said Perivoitos “loved the dog more than himself”. He said the dog was generally quiet, adding: “I never saw the dog be vicious.”

The crew have not been identified and the BBC declined to say what the documentary was about. The police said it was “entirely unrelated to the Met’s BBC documentary”, referring to the series The Met: Policing London, the second series of which has recently finished filming.

The reporters, a man in his 20s and a woman in her 30s, were interviewed under caution at a London police station earlier this week, the police said, because the property had been subjected to a temporary closure order.

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