A TV judge, Jeanine Pirro, ruled that Calvin Owensby breached a verbal contract when he sold his five-legged puppy to a woman from Charlotte after he’d already agreed to sell it to John Strong, the freak show owner. Pirro awarded Strong $4,000, but the TV network paid it on Owensby’s behalf.
Now Strong says he’s going to take the dog’s new owner to court and try to get possession of it, even though it only has four legs now.
Here’s the newest story.
To recap the sequence of events:
Calvin Owensby, an out-of-work electrician from Gastonia, owns two dogs who had five puppies in early June. One of the puppies had a fifth leg growing from between its two hind legs.
I wrote a story about the dog and put together a video.
Owensby couldn’t afford to have the fifth leg amputated, so a handful of readers called the Gazette, and others called Owensby’s veterinarian, offering to help pay for the operation. A week after the original story was published I started writing a second story about readers banding together to pay the vet bill, and the same day a photographer put a note on my desk, saying the owner of a Coney Island Freak show needed Owensby’s phone number because he wanted to buy the dog.
I called Owensby and passed along Strong’s phone number. When I called Owensby later that afternoon, he said he had agreed to sell the dog for $3,000. I also talked to Strong, who was ecstatic about getting a five-legged dog to display in his show. Here’s the second story.
Owensby told me I should put his phone number in the article, in case any readers wanted to come see the dog before it went to New York. That night he received many outraged phone calls and one call from a woman who wanted to buy the dog. The next morning he sold it to her for $4,000 and called off the freak show deal. Here’s the third story.
Around this time the Associated Press picked up on the story, and the AP’s version appeared in newspapers all over the country.
About a week later Strong announced that he planned to take legal action to prevent the dog’s new owner from getting its leg amputated. The new owner, Allyson Siegel, had the leg removed immediately when she heard this news.
Warner Brothers heard about the saga and invited Strong to sue Owensby on the television show Judge Jeanine Pirro. Strong won the trial.
Now he says he plans to sue Siegel for possession of the dog.
Here are all the stories in chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 [the surprise amputation], 6 [court TV pt. I], 7 [court TV verdict].
