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.
The order prevented anyone but the occupier entering for three months and was intended to stop people taking drugs or engaging in antisocial behaviour on the premises. The crew were released after police ascertained that they “were not there for those purposes and therefore it would not be in the public interest to pursue the matter further”.
Neighbours in the block said Perivoitos was believed to have lived in the building for more than 20 years. Geoff Morgan, 52, who was at home at the time of the attack, heard a commotion coming from a flat below him. He said: “I heard shouting – ‘Get him off! Get him off me!’
“He was shouting really loudly. He was bleeding from his neck. There was a lot of blood.”
Other residents described Perivoitos as a chaotic and disruptive neighbour. Several windows of his flat were boarded over and the order banning him from having visitors was taped to the front door.
“A lot of people were coming in there,” said a neighbour who gave his name as Pierre. “There would be fighting, sometimes shouting. A couple of times the police had to come. They even broke the door down.”
“At one point it was a crack house,” said Tayfun. “There were so many of them smoking. There were needles everywhere.” He said there had recently been efforts to get Perivoitos out of the building. “Then two or three weeks later one day we woke up and he wasn’t there any more.”
Another neighbour, who asked not to be named, said that when the incident took place there seemed nothing out of the ordinary about hearing screaming from upstairs. “We’re normally hearing screaming so it wasn’t like, ‘alert the police!’” she said. “He was a drug user; you could tell.”
On the night the dog attacked, she heard screams of “Help! Get the dog,” she said. “Everybody knows he’s on drugs but no matter how he was, he didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Perivoitos had been alone in the flat since his mother went into a care home last year, she said, adding that neighbours had speculated that the dog had been trying to protect him. “He loved his dog. His dog was his world. If he went out, you could hear the dog crying. He looked after his dog: if he didn’t have money he was always asking me for money to get it dog food, so it seems really strange.”
She added: “He was a clever boy. He used to fix my computers but he got in with the wrong crowd.” Another friend reportedly said that he had two master’s degrees, one in philosophy.
The dog was seized and is in secure kennels. Staffordshire bull terriers are not a banned breed under the Dangerous Dogs Act.
A postmortem examination carried out last Friday in Haringey gave the cause of death as hypovolemic shock – a condition caused by massive blood loss – and damage to the airway consistent with a dog bite.
The BBC said: “A crew making a BBC documentary were present – but not filming – at the time of the incident and called an ambulance. Given the ongoing inquiries, it would not be appropriate to comment further.”
The Met said: “A film crew making a documentary were present during the incident and called the London ambulance service. They are assisting police with their inquiries as officers prepare a report for the coroner.”
Perivoitos’s death is not being treated as suspicious, and his next of kin have been informed. The family have lived in the home, which is owned by the council, since 1996.
Source: The Guardian