Last Monday, actress Angie Harmon took to Instagram to report on the loss of her dog, Ollie, who she said was killed by an Instacart driver after he had dropped off a grocery delivery. In her post, Harmon made it sound like the man shot the dog for no apparent reason:

This Easter weekend a man delivering groceries for Instacart shot & killed our precious Oliver. He got out of his car, delivered the food & THEN shot our dog. Our ring camera was charging in the house, which he saw & then knew he wasn’t being recorded. The police let him go b/c he claimed “self defense”. He did not have a scratch or bite on him nor were his pants torn. He was shopping under a woman’s identity named Merle… the pic is on my story.

He shot our dog with my daughters & myself at home & just kept saying, “yeah, I shot your dog. Yeah I did.”
We are completely traumatized & beyond devastated at the loss of our beloved boy & family member.
#RIP OLLIE

The "Rizzoli and Isles" actress, whose middle and youngest teen daughters were also home at the time, received an outpouring of support and sympathy afterward from fans and celebrities alike, with the prevailing sentiment among them being that the driver was in the wrong.

Pictured below is Ollie, who was the smaller of Harmon's two dogs:

The dog’s owner, actress Angie Harmon, shared a post on social media, saying her family is ‘traumatized’ by the incident. https://t.co/PqKy5Muoxj

— WSOCTV (@wsoctv) April 2, 2024

Instacart has reportedly cooperated with law enforcement and said the shopper's account had been suspended:

“We were deeply saddened and disturbed to hear about this incident,” the company said. “We have no tolerance for violence of any kind, and the shopper account was immediately suspended from our platform. We have been in direct contact with the customer and are cooperating with law enforcement on their investigation.”

Harmon's home is in Charlotte, North Carolina, and while the case initially got a lot of national media attention, it dropped off their radar soon after, especially after the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said no charges would be filed because they had no evidence to disprove the story the delivery driver told of acting in self-defense.

But local media outlets have been keeping up with developments, with the most recent one being the release of three 911 calls: the one that appears to have come from Harmon's clearly distraught 18-year-old daughter in the immediate aftermath, one that came from the driver, and one that came from a sobbing Harmon while she was at the emergency vet clinic:

The driver also called police after the shooting. He said two dogs approached him while making a delivery, but only one attacked him.

“I’m calling her, texting her, ‘Can you please come get your dog?’” he said. “I tried to hurry up and get on the porch and deliver the stuff, and the dog tried to bite me. What am I supposed to do?” 

The caller in Harmon's house could be heard on the call shouting out to the driver, "You don’t kill something because they tried to bite you!”  All three calls can be heard by clicking here. Warning: The one of Harmon from the vet and the one that came from the house are hard to listen to due to their emotional nature.

Though the calls don't prove one side's story over the other, they do shed more light on what happened right after the shooting, with the Instacart delivery person not only calling 911 himself but also sticking around and waiting for police to get there so they could question him and he could tell them his side of events.

Social media chatter on the case, as more details have come out, has been mixed, with some saying Harmon should have had her dogs behind a fence or inside while others suggested the man, if he was truly attacked, maybe could have done something other than shoot and kill the dog.

I don't know who is telling the truth here but I think it's to his credit that the man stayed at the scene. Also, it just makes no sense that a delivery driver would randomly shoot a dog in someone's yard without provocation.

That said, I'd be inconsolable, too, if something like this ever happened to one of my pets. Several years ago, my cat was out in the yard when a neighbor's off-leash dog rushed her in her own yard and caused her to hurt her leg in the struggle to get away. I honestly thought she'd lose that leg and I was so upset and furious that it had happened.

I can't speak to Harmon's specific case, but it's been my experience that in many instances where a person or animal is attacked by a dog, the fault is more with the owner than the dog for not having them properly restrained. It's a hard thing to accept, but it's true, in my opinion.

In any event, my heart breaks for all parties involved in this. No matter who was at fault, when you lose a pet it is devastating, no two ways about it.

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