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Thursday, March 14, 2002

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

BLAIRSVILLE, Pa. -- To passers-by on the Market Street sidewalk, it probably looked simply as though Lois Griffith was wearing a white knit cap.

It wasn't a cap, though. It was a bandage -- clean gauze, wrapped round and round the top of this smallish, fragile-looking woman's head.

Underneath were scars and exposed bone, the savagery of a scalp ripped away by an attacking dog that was bigger and stronger than she, that seemed to lunge from nowhere on a night 5 1/2 weeks ago -- and didn't let go of her until it tore the skin from her head, front to back, bit through her side and collapsed a lung and dragged her 50 yards.

And farther underneath that bandage, firmly planted in her mind, there's fear.

"I have nightmares, pretty much about anything that could hurt me," said Griffith, 50, her wounds covered now save for one pink scar wandering from under the bandage into an eyebrow.

"The healing's going to be a long time," said daughter Lori Mackall, a trauma nurse who lives in the Johnstown area. "She's having terrible nightmares, so bad that she's afraid to go to sleep. They're about people trying to hurt her, bats trying to hurt her. Every time I go out there to the house to see her, she's crying."

Yesterday, in District Justice Jennifer Rega's courtroom, Griffith was supposed to tell her story at a preliminary hearing for the man charged with putting her in harm's way -- a man who state police say persuaded her to drop him off at a friend's eastern Indiana County hunting cabin, where an untethered, 178-pound Great Dane had the run of the place.

The hearing was postponed because defendant James Stonebraker, 50, of Homer City -- released from Indiana County Jail yesterday after being jailed since the Feb. 2 attack -- just hired a lawyer who wants time to study the case.

State police say Stonebraker told Griffith that he was too drunk to drive and persuaded her to give him a lift to friend Forrest Harris' hunting camp, about 10 minutes from the rural house where she lives with her parents.

The only life at the camp that night was the Great Dane, its turf limited only by a radio-activated collar that delivered a shock if the animal wandered beyond camp boundaries. A state police affidavit says Stonebraker knew that the dog had already bitten others --Carol Butler, 33, of nearby Coral, and her 9-year-old son, attacked as they picnicked at the cabin last summer.

As Stonebraker walked off into the cabin, Griffith got out of her car to check under the hood, worried because the vehicle's engine temperature light was coming on, Mackall said.

"I never saw the dog. There was no warning," Griffith recounted.

It was Stonebraker -- too drunk in the aftermath to coherently tell the story, state trooper Kurtis Rummel said -- who took credit for walloping the dog with an unloaded rifle. But it also was Stonebraker who let the next half-hour pass before alerting anyone to the attack -- and then phoning only Harris, not 911.

Griffith, 5-foot-4, is down to 98 pounds now from the 110 pounds that was no match for the dog.

"The pain is miserable," she said. "Sometimes, it's unbelievable."

Griffith, unemployed at the time of the attack, said she wanted to return to office management, probably with construction companies. But for now, she seldom leaves her parents' house, save for trips to doctors in Pittsburgh and their complex recovery regimen, likely to include surgeries.

"She's embarrassed by the way she looks," Mackall said. "She doesn't like to leave the house. ... She thinks that she's going to be disfigured."