The owner of a dog training facility in Washington has been arrested, police said, after he accidentally shot dead his employee.
In a bizarre twist, police said the fatal shooting happened while they were taping a gun safety video.
Wayne George Curry was taken into custody after the incident on Tuesday at his K9 training business, Kraftwerk K9, located in Rochester.
He was being held on $250,000 bail and appeared in Thurston County Court on Wednesday for a preliminary hearing, according to The Chronicle.
Allyson Zipp, Thurston County Superior Court judge, said she found probable cause to charge Curry, 64, with one count of first-degree manslaughter.
Authorities responded to his business around 10:28 a.m. on Tuesday for a report of a 22-year-old unconscious man who had sustained a gunshot wound.
The victim, who was identified as Curtice Gordon, was not breathing when officers and medical personnel arrived at the scene. According to court records, county dispatchers could hear people in the background screaming that “someone had accidentally shot themselves.”
Police said Gordon had been shot in the face near his nose by a stray round from Wayne’s weapon.
Emergency responders declared him dead on arrival at 10:37 a.m. An investigation is ongoing.
Three other Kraftwerk K9 employees were involved in the project. Two of them were instructed to serve as videographers and a third employee was asked to take photos.
Gordon has been asked to agitate the dog by “using a whip for noise and wearing a bite sleeve,” the court documents state.
Gordon was standing about 30 feet to the left of a target. Curry, police said, wanted to illustrate how the canine would not react to gunfire when he allegedly shot at the target with a rifle 10 times. The point of the advertisement was to show why people should get a dog instead of a gun for protection.
Curry, the subject in the video, shot the target while holding a dog and then sent the dog after an assailant.
“He said in the video, the dog is supposed to bark in a certain direction, and he’d shoot the target in a different direction and then the dog would go and bite the guy with the sleeve,” the Thurston County Prosecutor’s Office stated in the affidavit obtained by the outlet.
Curry, police said, then allegedly added that “you’re supposed to drop the gun when you let the dog go.”
After Curry allegedly fired one of the rounds, the dog reacted from a down position to standing and jerked Wayne’s body as he held the firearm. That’s when everyone on set heard a groan from Gordon and saw him collapse, court documents state.
Curry told police he did not intentionally try to harm Gordon. He was observed distraught and having multiple anxiety attacks on the scene following the incident.
