Five dogs fatally mauled Jane Rock, 61,a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, in a neighborhood about 65 miles south of Jacksonville. Several neighbors tried pulling the dogs off the woman and one shot a gun into the air to scare the dogs away. Putnam County Sheriff’s deputies found the woman on the ground when they arrived at the scene in Interlachen Lake Estates. The deputies provided first aid to the victim and applied three tourniquets to stem her blood loss until an ambulance arrived. They also found the dogs inside a fence at a nearby home. The animals, described as mixed-breed, were seized and will be euthanized. The woman has died at hospital. Before her death, doctors amputated an arm in their attempt to save her.
An initial investigation revealed the dogs had escaped from a fenced yard by moving rocks that were lining the bottom of the fence. In the past three years, the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office has responded four times to the neighborhood for animal-related calls. Early indications are that at least two of those previous calls were related to the same address. More than 5,400 postal employees were attacked by dogs in the United States in 2021, according to data released by the U.S. Postal Service.
