An eye witness to last week’s tragic death of a pit bull in a Vancouver park has come forward to explain what he says really happened in the incident.

Controversy erupted last week after a 72-year-old man pulled out a knife and stabbed a pit bull to death, which he claims was attacking his pug on November 20. He says he took out the knife only after he couldn’t separate the two in an on-leash area. The pit bull’s owner, Samantha Fairbridge, claims the pug, which was off-leash, sparked the confrontation and its owner went berserk.

But Alex St. Jacques, who was an eye witness to the attack and also jumped in to try and help last Wednesday, paints a different picture.

“I could see it, [the man] was trying and trying and trying [to separate the dogs],” St Jacques explains. “He had his hands in the mouth [of the pit bull] and was gouging at the eyes, anything he could do to separate them. And as a last result he felt he had to save his boy.

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“It’s like saving a child. People that are dog lovers or animal lovers will understand, it’s like your family.”

The pit bull’s owner says it was a vicious and brutal attack on her dog Pandora, who was on-leash. There are reports the 72-year-old man, who has not given his name, stabbed the pit bull up to 10 times and was screaming obscenities as he tried to break up the fight.

In an earlier interview Fairbridge said, “My dog bit the pug on the ear and was not letting go… So the owner of the pug ran up and immediately pulled out a knife and began to stab my dog. As he was doing so, he was yelling, ‘you deserve to die.’”

She then said the 72-year-old picked up his dog and fled the scene.

By St. Jacques’s account he says, “the dog was never stabbed repeatedly… I saw one puncture wound on his side near his lung. The pit bull had the pug in his mouth shaking it violently like it was going to kill it – there was no such thing as repeatedly stabbing him.

“And this aggressive vocabulary that I heard that he was saying ‘you deserved to die’, there was no such thing. The only thing he said was ‘your pit bull was going to kill my dog’ and that was it. And he left because he was scared for his dog.”

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As the story unfolds, there is still a lot of confusion and difference of opinion on what happened that afternoon. Today, the SPCA confirms the pit bull was stabbed three times. St. Jacques says he will be contacting the SPCA to make sure investigators get his side of the story.

A necropsy is scheduled to be done on Tuesday.