Pack of Dogs, Including Pair of Pit Bulls, Attack Girl, 8

A pack of four dogs, including at least two pit bulls, leaped a fence around their owner’s yard and swarmed into a group of schoolchildren in Lake Los Angeles on Friday, knocking an 8-year-old girl to the ground and repeatedly biting her, sheriff’s deputies reported.

The injured girl, Annette Stinebiser, was bitten on the shoulders, neck, back, hip and legs before the dogs were pulled away.

The girl was airlifted to a hospital in Lancaster for treatment and was home Friday evening in good condition, but with more than 25 stitches closing her wounds, her mother said.

The dogs were impounded by county animal control officers.

Annette was walking with five other children about her age when the attack occurred at 2:20 p.m. in the 16800 block of Mackennas Gold Avenue in Lake Los Angeles, 10 miles east of Palmdale in the Antelope Valley, sheriff’s deputies said.

The children had just gotten off a school bus and were walking to their homes or to a baby-sitter’s house when the dogs escaped from a nearby yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. Neighbors estimated the height of the fence at about five feet.

Some of the children dropped their school books and ran as the barking dogs charged them. Annette, who lives a block away but was heading to a baby-sitter’s home just two houses from where the dogs lived, had her back to the dogs when they jumped her.

“I was closest to them and didn’t see them coming until they got me,” Annette said after returning home from the hospital.

“I didn’t jump back in time. My friend tried to pull me away but they knocked me down and started biting on me. It hurt. It was scary.”

The third-grader’s baby-sitter, Mary Edgar, said she ran from her house after seeing the girl on the ground with one of the dogs biting her shoulder.

“I heard barking and screaming and thought, ‘Oh, great, another dog fight,’ ” Edgar said. “I looked out and saw my three boys running and the dog on Annette. I ran out there.”

Edgar said the dogs’ owner, whose name deputies refused to disclose and neighbors did not know, had pulled the dogs away from the girl.

The owner could not be contacted for comment.

The girl’s mother, Judith Stinebiser, said Annette “was really hurt.”

“It scared her too. It was an unprovoked attack,” she said.

Deputy Cory Kennedy said county animal control officers impounded the four dogs while the incident is investigated. He said there was no preliminary indication that the owner was negligent.

“It looks like the dogs were in a pen and were able to get out,” he said.

A spokesman for the county Animal Care & Control department said two of the dogs were pit bulls and two were mixed breeds, possibly part pit bull.