![\"Prairie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/l0dg49w71ft2fgp8.jpg\")
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DALLAS – The first thought for Joshua Painter was to protect his dog, Bella.<\/p>\n
Painted was shot four times<\/a> while the two were out walking in Pleasant Grove on Aug. 31.<\/p>\n “I dropped, and I rolled and tried to get her up to me,” Painter said.<\/p>\n Just before 11 p.m. on Aug. 31, Dallas police said 18-year-old David Gabriel Ramirez opened fire, seemingly at random.<\/p>\n “He said, \u2018do you want to die today\u2019? I said, \u2018dude, take me off your script\u2019 and I kept walking,” Painter said.<\/p>\n Investigators said Ramirez had been drinking and had just left his house about a mile away, extremely hostile and armed with a handgun.<\/p>\n Graphic cell phone video from the incident shows Painter bleeding on the side of Prairie Creek Road. Bella, not leaving his side.<\/p>\n Charlee Croker was just a stranger from Mesquite when she first saw Painter’s story.<\/p>\n At first, she thought he was a homeless man with a white pit bull from her neighborhood so she started calling Dallas hospitals. Turns out, he wasn’t. It was Painter.<\/p>\n “He was like, can you help me get my dog back? I was hooked. I am a dog mom,” Croker said.<\/p>\n Croker picked Painter up from Parkland. Took him to Dallas Animal Shelter to reunite with Bella, and even put him up in a hotel for the weekend.<\/p>\n “I’m so thankful I got my dog back,” Painter said. “And a room to rest my neck for a bit and my foot.”<\/p>\n What’s next remains up in the air. Bella and Painter though, together again.<\/p>\n As for Ramirez, he was arrested the night of the shooting, but has since bonded out.<\/p>\n The Source: Information in this article comes from interviews by Fox 4’s Peyton Yager. Information on the initial shooting comes from previous FOX 4 coverage and the Dallas Police Department.<\/p>\n Dallas<\/a>Crime and Public Safety<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DALLAS – The first thought for Joshua Painter was to protect his dog, Bella. Painted was shot four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1046,102,581,104,103,223,216,393],"class_list":["post-434093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-crime-publicsafety","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-county","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-news","tag-tx","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"PREVIOUS](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/r8daa4d24lgzwuuq.jpg\")
Painter and Bella reunited thanks to a stranger <\/p>\n