Lady Gaga’s Dog Walker Recalls Being Shot and Cradling ‘Guardian Angel’ Dog
[ad_1]
Lady Gaga’s dog walker recounted in a vivid Instagram post on Monday his frantic thoughts in the moments after he was shot in Los Angeles last week by two men who stole two of the singer’s French bulldogs and left him in a pool of blood.
Referring to Asia, a third dog owned by the singer, the dog walker, Ryan Fischer, wrote that as “blood poured from my gun shot wound, an angel trotted over and laid next to me. My panicked screams calmed as I looked at her, even though it registered that the blood pooling around her tiny body was my own.”
Mr. Fischer, who did not immediately respond to a message on Instagram, wrote that he was “still in recovery from a very close call with death” and “will write and say more later.”
The Feb. 24 shooting took place around 9:40 p.m. local time as Mr. Fischer was walking north on Sierra Bonita Avenue in Hollywood, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
As of Monday, the Police Department had not announced an arrest in the case, nor released information about the woman who returned the dogs, unharmed, to the police two days later.
“Investigators are still working the case, and the investigation is still ongoing,” Capt. Stacy D. Spell, a spokeswoman for the department, said in an email on Monday. She also referred to a statement the police released last week, saying they would not discuss the woman who returned the dogs, nor the location of where they were found, “due to the active criminal investigation and for her safety.”
Mr. Fischer’s Instagram posts, which accompanied pictures of him in a hospital bed, included praise for family and friends, as well as for emergency personnel and health care workers: “you literally saved my life and helped me take newborn walks, I can’t thank you enough.”
What exactly led to the attack is not clear. Most of what is publicly known comes from surveillance video from a nearby home.
On it, Mr. Fischer is seen walking on a sidewalk, which is partly obscured by a fence, as a white car pulls up next to him. Two men exit the car and tussle with Mr. Fischer. He screams repeatedly and moments later, a gunshot is heard. “Help me, I’ve been shot,” Mr. Fischer can be heard saying just after the car drives away. “I’ve been shot. Oh my god.”
Mr. Fischer recalled that exact moment, writing on Instagram, “I cradled Asia as best I could, thanked her for all the incredible adventures we’d been on together, apologized that I couldn’t defend her brothers, and then resolved that I would still try to save them… and myself.”
“I looked backed at my guardian angel. I smiled at her shaking form, thankful that at least she would be ‘okay,’” he added.
When emergency medical workers treated Mr. Fischer, he was cradling the dog, according to KABC-TV, which had a helicopter over the scene.
Officer Jeff Lee, also a spokesman for the Police Department, said last week that a semiautomatic handgun was believed used in the attack.
The once-stolen dogs are named Koji and Gustav and belong to Lady Gaga, who had offered a $500,000 reward for information about them, a representative for the singer said. Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, announced in 2016 that she had added a black-and-white puppy to her family of dogs, which included two named Koji and Asia.
At the time, she named the puppy “cowpig and moopig” before naming it Gustav. She has featured the dogs in her social media posts over the years.
In his Instagram post on Monday, Mr. Fischer included a message to Lady Gaga: “your babies are back and the family is whole… we did it!”