Woman Saves Boy Attacked by Dog : Rescue: The 2-year-old had wandered into a yard containing two pit bulls. A neighbor heard his cries, scaled a fence and fought off the animal.

Two-year-old Dylan Padilla is getting used to the stitches on his head and right ear--the consequences of his frightening lesson that not all dogs are friendly.

The youngster was attacked Tuesday by a pit bull a few blocks from his family’s home on the 4900 block of West 141st Street, near Hawthorne. He was saved by a neighbor, who was bitten in the rescue.

Though the boy will eventually require plastic surgery to repair his ear, he was released to his family Tuesday after receiving treatment at a Hawthorne hospital.

“He’s a tough guy,” said Carlos Padilla, Dylan’s father, Wednesday. “He’s back to normal now, running around playing with his brother.”

Padilla said he was cleaning his house around noon on Tuesday when Dylan slipped into the back yard and crawled out of a seven-inch opening in a fence. He said he thought Dylan and a 4-year-old son were watching television.

The child walked off the family’s property, crossed nearby Oceangate Avenue, climbed a small fence and wandered into a nearby back yard containing two chained pit bulls.

“He likes dogs,” said Padilla, a laid-off aerospace worker. “He thinks all dogs are friendly and probably went to pet this one.”

One male and one female dog were in the yard. The male dog, “Bull,” knocked Dylan on his back and began biting his head and ear and mauling his shoulders and chest while the child cried for help.

Kathy Martinez, who lives next door to the pit bulls’ owners, was leaving to drive her children to their piano lessons when a woman pushing a child in a stroller alerted her to the cries.

Martinez jumped over the fence and rushed to the scene. When she called out the dog’s name, she said, he stopped for a moment but then continued biting the child.

“The dog was biting his ear like he was trying to pull it off,” she said. “It was like he was chewing a Milk Bone . . . he was wagging his tail like he was enjoying what he was doing.”

Armed with a plastic funnel--the first object she could find--she began hitting the dog, which then released the child and turned on her.

Martinez said she felt faint after she backed away, out of the dog’s reach. “(Dylan) was crying his little heart out and he came to me and we were sitting there holding each other,” she said.

Meanwhile, Padilla had discovered his child was missing. After checking his own and his neighbor’s yards, he combed the streets in his car--and finally spotted Martinez and his son, who was covered with mud, grass and blood.

“I didn’t know what to think,” he said. “I thought a car had hit him.”

Padilla and Martinez were taken to Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne. The child received stitches on his head and on his right ear, where cartilage had been severed. Martinez received three stitches on the back of her hand.

“Without a doubt, if (Martinez) hadn’t jumped in, that boy would have been dead in a minute,” said Sgt. Eugene Peterson of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Lennox station.

The pit bull will be at Los Angeles County’s Animal Care and Control Shelter in Carson for at least 10 days for rabies observation, said Bob Ballenger, a county animal shelter official. It is unlicensed and does not appear to have had a rabies vaccination, both violations of California law, Ballenger said.

The owner, listed as Darry Gorden on the impound ticket, could face a penalty of $20 for every year the dog was unlicensed and costs of impoundment and obtaining a vaccination, Ballenger said.

The Carson animal shelter will investigate the case, he said.

Meanwhile, Padilla says he has added higher latches to his doors and has blocked all the holes in the fencing surrounding his home. He says he has been trying to sell the house--and is more determined to do so following the pit bull attack.

He also expressed gratitude to Martinez.

“If it wasn’t for her, something drastic could have happened,” Padilla said. “She saved his life.”