The family of a 73-year-old Ashville woman who was killed by two dogs in October is suing the dogs’ owners, as well as the Pickaway County dog warden, and the condominium association where the dogs’ owners lived.
In February, a jury found Susan Withers, 62, and her son, Adam Withers, 35, guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal dog attack of Jo Ann Echelbarger. The Withers are being held in the Pickaway County Jail while they await sentencing.
Echelbarger was the Withers’ neighbor in Ashville when the Withers’ two pit bull terriers, Apollo and Echo, attacked her while she was gardening.
Police shot and killed the dogs during the attack.
The wrongful death civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Pickaway County Common Pleas Court alleges that the Withers’ dogs had “terrorized the community for years” and that the owners allowed them to roam free.
Rex Elliott, an attorney with the Columbus law firm Cooper Elliott, is representing Echelbarger’s estate. He said that while the suit names the Withers and several other parties, including the Pickaway County Dog Shelter, the main defendants are county Dog Warden Preston Schumacher, the Reserve at Ashton Village condo association, and the condo’s property manager, Towne Properties Asset Management.
At a news conference Wednesday, Elliott said the dog warden and the condo management company knew the Withers’ dogs were dangerous and didn’t do enough to remove them.
“Had the dog warden, the condominium association or the property management company done their jobs, Jo Ann would be alive and with her family today,” Elliott said. He called Echelbarger’s death “the most vicious and savage dog mauling in the history of the state.”
The legal complaint says that Echelbarger and her husband moved into the private condo community in June 2024 and that they were not warned about the Withers’ dogs, even though one pit bull had been declared a “dangerous dog” one year before.
The condo association first issued a warning to the Withers in February 2015, then went on to issue six additional warnings: in May 2017; September 2020; April, May, and June 2021; and March 2022. One dog attacked a visitor in October 2023 and the other bit a visitor the following May, according to the complaint.
Elliott added that in one of those incidents, one of the Withers’ dogs seriously injured a woman and killed her dog.
“Dogs do not show aggressive tendencies and then get better. They escalate,” Elliott said. “And so, once that occurs, they're a ticking time bomb and you need to do something about that.”
In September, condo management got a court order to remove the two dogs, but the lawsuit alleges that management never followed through.
“The HOA had a responsibility to take that order to law enforcement and get those dogs out of there the day that it was issued,” Elliott said.
The suit also claims that the Pickaway County dog wardens were “untrained, improperly trained, improperly supervised, and improperly retained to the point where the dog wardens were incapable of performing their duties in a non-reckless manner,” and that wardens didn’t enforce dangerous dog requirements for the Withers’ pit bulls.
Three weeks before Echelbarger was attacked, police were called to the condo community because the two pit bulls had ingested cocaine, according to the lawsuit. It claims the dog wardens refused to come help a police officer.
The suit seeks more than $25,000 in damages. Echelbarger’s adult children said they also want to see changes in Pickaway County and beyond.
Echelbarger’s daughter, Earlene Romine, called her mother “the rock of the family,” and said she was extremely healthy and had many years of life ahead of her.
“This is not what you expect your parent to go through. This is not what you expect to happen to anyone you love. She did not deserve this. She was tortured and she suffered,” Romine said.
The family and Elliott noted that Echelbarger was attacked by a dog as a child and as a result was afraid of dogs.
Echelbarger’s son, Bill Rogers, said Echelbarger moved to the condo to make her life easier as she took care of her husband, Stanley Echelbarger, who was suffering from dementia. He said the family didn’t know about the dogs when they moved in.
“It's awful. It's reckless. I feel like they were gambling with a lot of people's lives that day, and she (Echelbarger) was the one that paid the price,” Rogers said.
The family and Elliott also said that Stanley Echelbarger’s health deteriorated quickly after his wife’s death, and that he is now in hospice.
“What we're trying to do is send a message loud and clear that those responsible for policing these types of activities need to be more vigilant about what they do,” Elliott said. “We hope this message reverberates throughout the state of Ohio, so something like this doesn't happen again.”
Elliot added that a jury can only award in compensation, but the point of this case is to provoke change.
WOSU reached out to defendants in the case, but did not immediately hear back.
