A woman died Thursday night after her two dogs turned aggressive and mauled her while she was wrestling with them in the yard of her mobile home in Greenville, South Carolina, authorities said.
Nancy Cherryl Burgess-Dismuke's screams Thursday afternoon got the attention of her neighbors, who ran to help and called 911, WYFF News 4 reported.
"They was trying to kill Miss Nancy," Amber Greer, a neighbor who first called 911, told WYFF. Greer said she heard Burgess-Dismuke call out: "Help! Somebody help me. They're attacking me."
"One dog was on one arm eating it, and one was on the other arm eating it," Greer said. "Remind you, Nancy is what, about 80 pounds? She's tiny."
Neighbors told the Greenville News that Burgess-Dismuke often played and wrestled with her boxer mixes outside her home, but that they realized the attack was serious when the dogs started aggressively biting her.
One neighbor grabbed a car part and another grabbed a blunt ax to beat the dogs and chase them away from her so she could get to safety.
“When they finally got the dogs off of her, and finally got them to go, she threw her body over the fence,” Greer told Greenville News. "She didn’t jump; she threw her body like you never seen before. They were eating her."
Officers who responded to the call applied tourniquets to Burgess-Dismuke's arms to help stop the bleeding, the Greenville News reported.
"She was already so far gone. One arm was already bit completely off, the other arm was barely hanging on by a piece of meat," Denzel Whiteside, one of the neighbors who helped Burgess-Dismuke get to safety, told the Greenville News. "It was the longest 10 minutes of my life."
Burgess-Dismuke died Thursday night following the attack.
Senior Deputy Coroner Kent Dill told the Greenville News that Burgess-Dismuke lost a large amount of blood from several "extremely severe" dog bites. She was talking to paramedics when they arrived on the scene, but went into cardiac arrest after being transported to the hospital, Dill told the Washington Post.
Authorities are investigating Burgess-Dismuke's death, and her autopsy results and cause of death are still pending, according the Washington Post.
Greenville County Animal Care took control of the dogs, and they were scheduled to be euthanized on Friday, a spokesperson for the county told Greenville News.
Representatives for the Greenville County Sheriff's Office and Greenville County Animal Care did not immediately respond to a request for comment.