By the time the mauling ended, 50-year-old Steve Constantine was left mostly naked on a darkened east-side Detroit street with his arms and legs shredded, and he was clinging to life, Eric D. Lawrence reports in the Free Press.
"There was no streetlight, and it was a dark street and nobody around so I'm screwed. I'm like, 'Somebody help me,' but who's going to hear me. I didn't see a soul," Constantine told Lawrence. "I don't recall people showing up and helping me, and somebody said they had to shoot one of the dogs, you know, and somebody said the dogs were on me so they couldn't shoot because, you know, they might have shot me."
For Constantine, many of the details of the attack are fuzzy, but he recalls a dog biting him and one "calmly" licking him. He pleaded for help and begged the dogs to stop.
Constantine is originally from Warren but came to Detroit about a year ago, Lawrence writes. He was in critical condition when he was brought to Detroit Receiving Hospital after the nighttime attack on Oct. 2 and underwent scores of surgeries that included skin grafts to cover the bones in his right arm and leg.
He calls himself fortunate and speaks of optimism even as he describes his future as uncertain. Constantine has lost his left ear, most of his left arm and his left leg below the knee.
