Northbridge Still Lists the Animal Control Officer Who Shot Husky Odin at About Ten Yards After a Coyote Call on Fowler Road
Odin was 11 months old, about 55 pounds, a husky wearing a flea collar and a shock collar. On November 19, 2024, he was in the woods off Fowler Road in Northbridge, Massachusetts, when the town’s animal-control officer shot him dead on a coyote call. His owner, Kirk Rumford, later said it felt like losing a child. Police Chief Timothy Labrie’s public answer was mistaken identity, no malice, and no punishment. The AEGIS Alliance is keeping this file under Police Accountability because the useful question was never whether the officer woke up hoping to kill a pet. The useful question is why a man whose job is animals fired at roughly ten yards before he could see the hardware on the dog’s neck, and why the town still lists him as if the shot were a weather event.
Local stations had the sequence within three days. NBC Boston, the Milford Daily News, Spectrum News, Boston 25, and the CBS Boston package at the top of this page, reported by Paul Burton, all landed on the same bones. The department took two calls about a coyote around midday. The second came from a person off Fowler Road who was raking leaves and believed a coyote was in the yard and would not leave. She was afraid. Labrie said the animal-control officer found the animal, yelled at it, and fired when it kept coming and closed to about ten yards. The officer then saw the collars. The coyote was a puppy who had gotten out.
What “first mistake” is being asked to cover
Labrie said the officer, Daniel Chauvin, had been with the Northbridge Police Department since 2001 and that this was the first mistake of that career. He said Chauvin had euthanized coyotes on earlier calls and that the animal looked like one. The department told reporters it truly felt bad. Feeling bad is not a finding. A finding would answer the questions a use-of-force file is supposed to answer even when the dead body has fur. How far was the shot, and from what cover? Was a second officer there? Did anyone scan for a tag, call in a loose-dog report, or try a catch pole before the gun? Was the body photographed where it fell? Was the leaf-raker’s description compared with a husky that lived on that street? Those answers never became a public report. The story stopped at tragic error.
Northbridge is a Worcester County town, and animal control sits inside the police department. The ordinary Massachusetts brief for that job is Chapter 140 of the General Laws: dog complaints, animals at large, the unglamorous work of bites and licenses. None of that text says to shoot when the caller uses the word coyote. Coyotes in Massachusetts are real. They take cats. They scare people with small dogs. A resident who calls is not inventing a problem. The failure is downstream of the call. An animal-control officer is supposed to be the person who can tell a 55-pound house husky from a wild canid at working distance. Coat color is a bad test. Huskies are the breed strangers already mislabel as wolves on a phone camera. Collar, gait, and a residential backyard are better tests. A flea collar is plastic. A shock collar is a second piece of plastic with a buckle and a box. Missing both at ten yards is the case.
The page that still has his name on it
When a chief says there will be no punishment, three clocks start. Internal affairs can still write a letter. The town manager, who appoints the animal-control officer under Northbridge’s rules, can decline to reappoint. A civil court can put a number on the loss. Public reporting has not produced a firing, a posted verdict, or a written coyote protocol that tells the next officer to close the distance before firing. The department’s own animal-control page still lists Dan Chauvin, with a town hall line at (508)*******16 and a hotmail address. Wildlife sightings, the page says, can be reported to that same office number. There is no checklist under that sentence. There is no note that a collared dog was killed on Fowler Road because a caller said coyote.
That silence trains the next call. Officers learn what a chief will absorb. Residents learn whether a collar is enough to keep a dog alive. Animal-control work is already a grind of loose pets, bitten mail carriers, and rabies paperwork. Adding a fatal mistake with no written change tells every husky owner in the Blackstone Valley to lock the gate, which they should, and tells every officer that a coyote ticket is close to a hunting license, which it is not. Rumford said non-lethal options should have come first. Catch poles, noise, a live trap, a second look at the neck. Lethal force on a suspected coyote in a street grid is a choice. Northbridge treated it as the default and then called the default an accident.
The AEGIS Alliance is not claiming Chauvin wanted a pet dead. Intent is the wrong test when the job is identification. A surgeon who takes the wrong kidney does not need to have wanted the error. The hospital still changes the checklist. Northbridge never published one. The policy, nearly two years after the shot, is still the chief’s quote.
How a local killing becomes a one-line oddity
National pickups flattened Odin into a weird Massachusetts item and moved on. That flattening is how a discipline decision disappears. If the story is filed as a mix-up, nobody asks whether the next coyote call will be handled the same way. The CBS video is still the cleanest local record because it holds Rumford’s voice next to the department’s. Family photos did the rest of the work on other stations. An empty crate in a living room is not a punchline. It is what is left when the official file ends at “we feel bad.”
Readers of the Police Accountability desk will recognize the rhythm from larger cases: name the mistake, decline the consequence, wait for the cycle to move. Lee County, Florida, reporting such as the Carmine Marceno file and the Michael Broady 911 call in rural Alabama are not this husky. The civic habit is the same. A separate video that spread in June 2026 showed officers shooting a pet during a noise call and then standing in silence while the owner screamed. That was not Northbridge, and it should not be laundered into this docket. It is evidence that “we thought it was a threat” has become a sentence departments reach for whenever a dog is dead and a gun was faster than a question.
What would have kept him alive
A written rule does not need to be poetic. If the caller says coyote, the officer confirms species before a shot inside a residential grid. If the animal is wearing a collar, the shot is off the table unless a person is being mauled, which nobody claimed here. If the animal is approaching and the officer has time to yell “hey” three times, the officer has time to see a shock collar at ten yards. If the identification is wrong, the town publishes the review and changes the next call. Northbridge did the yell. It did not do the rest.
This article sits with other US animal and force stories under US News and Odd News, because a husky shot for looking wild gets filed as both, and the oddity label is part of how the consequence vanished. Related reading includes the Nantucket great white rescue, where the people on the beach slowed down, and the Arkansas back-seat beating, where video at least forced paper. Primary local record: the NBC Boston interview with Rumford, Boston 25’s account of the ten-yard shot, the Milford Daily News write-up of Labrie’s comments, and the department’s Animal Control page, still headed by Chauvin’s name.
Odin is not coming back. The remaining public fact is narrower than a slogan and harder to spin. The officer who fired is still the town’s animal-control officer. The page where residents are told to report wildlife does not mention a collar. On the record Northbridge has been willing to publish, a shock collar at ten yards was close enough.
