The true story behind Belle Gibson – and where the wellness scammer is now

A new Netflix series dramatises the real-life story of Belle Gibson, the Australian wellness influencer who claimed she cured brain cancer with a healthy diet. WH separates fact from fiction and uncovers the true story that inspired the show

Fact vs. fiction: How accurate is Apple Cider Vinegar?

Much of what we see on screen in Apple Cider Vinegar stays true to the real-life events surrounding Belle Gibson. Born in Tasmania on October 8, 1991, Gibson repeatedly lied about her age, often claiming to be three years older than she actually was.

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From an early age, Gibson seemed prone to fabricating stories. A former classmate described her as ‘a pathological liar’, while an ex-boyfriend recalled that ‘she couldn’t go five minutes without making up a story’. These tendencies play out in the Netflix series, setting the scene for what would later manifest into the most elaborate deception of all – her fake cancer diagnosis, which catapulted her to influencer fame before her eventual downfall.

Here’s what you need to know about the wellness influencer and how she became the woman that everyone loves to hate.

Why you need to watch ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’, the new Netflix show

Who is Belle Gibson? 4 things you need to know about the wellness swindler

1. Belle Gibson’s childhood remains a bit of a mystery

Belle’s childhood remains largely mysterious, with reports indicating she grew up in various parts of southeastern Australia with her mother, Natalie Dal-Bello, before becoming estranged from her family.

‘I grew up in a very dysfunctional home. I never knew my dad, and grew up with my mum, who had multiple sclerosis, and my brother, who was autistic,’ she wrote in the introduction of her book, The Whole Pantry: 100 Recipes for Eating Deliciously, Getting Back to Basics, and Living a Well-Nourished Life.

‘Because Mum was so ill, she needed a lot of help – I remember being six years old and cooking dinner for the first time, standing on a chair to reach the stove. I didn’t understand the ritual of food – cooking was just a survival tool to me, a job, a way out of doing the dishes. Nutrition was drinking fruit juice (which has more sugar than Coca-Cola) and eating more than a stomach could handle – leading me to be severely overweight in my preteen years.

‘I moved out of home when I was twelve years young, changing my life forever. It was a year of many firsts – in my new home I had a vegetable garden and, for the first time, I found out what real food was, how it grew, and the importance of nurturing a garden.’

2. Belle lied about having cancer for years

Gibson’s deception started long before Instagram. As early as 2005, she was already posting online about having brain cancer. After dropping out of school at 16, she moved to Perth and began sharing even more outlandish medical claims in online forums, stating she had undergone major surgeries and even died on the operating table for several minutes. None of these claims were ever substantiated.

‘I had a stroke at work – I will never forget sitting alone in the doctor’s office three weeks later, waiting for my test results. He called me in and said, “You have malignant brain cancer, Belle. You’re dying. You have six weeks. Four months, tops.” I remember a suffocating, choking feeling and then not much else,’ she wrote in her book.

Gibson claimed she went through chemotherapy and radiography for two months, before deciding to embark on more ‘holistic’ treatments – focusing on a healthy diet.

In 2013, she began documenting her story, explaining how she cured herself of cancer by rejecting conventional medicine in favour of a healthy lifestyle (a vegetarian diet, which included organic food and excluded dairy and gluten), encouraging other cancer sufferers to do the same.

She started an Instagram account under the username @healing_belle (way before being ‘Insta-famous’ was a thing), posting as a cancer patient healing naturally through alternative therapies such as craniosacral therapy, oxygen therapy, and colonics. Her bio read: ‘Belle Gibson: Gamechanger with brain cancer + a food obsession’.

In reality, medical records later revealed that an MRI scan in 2011 showed no signs of cancer at all.The Weekly

Belle Gibson’s Instagram feed was filled with colourful smoothies, healthy meals and words of wisdom

‘I have been healing a severe and malignant brain cancer for the past few years with natural medicine, Gerson therapy and foods. It’s working for me and I am grateful to be there sharing this journey…’ she wrote in her first post on Instagram.

Gibson rapidly gained a huge following at a dizzying ascent – she wrote about cancer, yet always looked the picture of health. Her profile, filled with inspirational quotes and pictures of ‘super smoothies’ exploded and she went on to gain more than 200,000 Instagram followers. From there, her inspirational story was featured in The Australian Women’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Elle and even on national morning TV.

3. Belle built a wellness empire, despite having zero medical background

Using her following, she successfully launched ‘the world’s first health, wellness and lifestyle app’, The Whole Pantry, in 2014. The app was an instant hit. It was downloaded more than 200,000 times in the first month of release and went on to be voted Apple’s Best Food and Drink App of the year.Belle Gibson

Belle Gibson’s wellness app and The Whole Pantry cookbook promised to help her 300,000-plus followers go ‘back to basics’ and ‘discover what it means to be truly nourished’

In 2014 – after claiming her cancer had spread to her blood, spleen, uterus and liver – Gibson then landed a book deal with Penguin, securing an A$132,000 (£66,000) advance. She wrote and developed a clean-eating cookbook under the same name as her app. By the end of 2014, her book had sold 16,000 copies.

She was chosen by Apple for her app to be featured in its new smartwatch, and awarded Cosmopolitan Magazine’s ‘Fun Fearless Female’ award, in Sydney.

Accepting her prize, she spoke tearfully about the legacy she was leaving. ‘I dedicate this award to every one of you who do follow me on Instagram or through the Whole Pantry because through that, I created the world’s best health, fitness and lifestyle app – and through that, we are changing lives,’ she said.MM7

In 2014 Belle Gibson received Cosmopolitan magazine’s ‘Fun Fearless Female’ award in the social media category

In the space of just 18 months, Gibson had become the most famous wellness ‘influencer’ in the world. But Gibson wasn’t just profiting from her lies – she was also deceiving charities. She pledged to donate proceeds from app downloads to various causes, including the Schwarz family, who needed funding for their son’s brain cancer treatment. However, investigations revealed that none of these donations ever reached their intended recipients.

4. Belle’s lies caught up with her in the end

In early 2015, cracks started to appear in Belle’s story and her empire began to crumble. She was earning a significant amount of money from her book deal and app, and things started to unravel after reports emerged that she had failed to donate the cookbook’s profits to charity, as she had promised.

Investigative journalists Beau Donnelly and Nick Toscano began digging for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers – suspicious about the accuracy of her story.

They published a story in March 2015 exposing her charity fraud: ‘A social media entrepreneur who shot to fame off the back of her cancer survival story failed to hand over thousands of fundraising dollars promised to charity’ and Gibson went into damage control.

When pressed for medical proof, Gibson faltered, suggesting she may have been ‘misdiagnosed’.

Then, in an interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly in May 2015, Belle admitted that she had never really had cancer.

‘None of it’s true,’ she confessed. ‘It’s just very scary, to be honest. Because you start to doubt the crux of things that make up who you are. You know, I’m blonde and I’m tall, and I’ve got hazel eyes and I’ve got cancer. And all of a sudden, you take away some of those high-level things and it’s really daunting.’

Penguin pulled her book, Apple removed her app, and she faced legal consequences.

Where is Belle Gibson now?

Donnelly and Toscano later published a book called The Woman Who Fooled the World, which detailed Gibson’s story – it’s this expose that the new Netflix series, Apple Cider Vinegar, is based upon.

The real-life Belle Gibson, unsurprisingly, now keeps out of the limelight for the most part.

What we do know, however, is that, as per The Guardian, she was fined $410,000 (£240,000) in 2017, by the Australian government, for misleading and deceptive conduct.

In June 2019, nearly two years after the ruling, she told authorities she was not in a financial position to pay. However, reports from Consumer Affairs Victoria revealed that she had spent around $91,000 between 2017 and 2019 on personal expenses, including luxury items and overseas trips.

Since then, her home has been raided twice – first in January 2020 and again in May 2021 –as authorities attempted to recover the money she owed. Despite these efforts, there has been little public information about whether the government has successfully reclaimed any of the debt.

More recent media reports place her as living in Melbourne, with a 2020 ABC News report saying Gibson had been ‘adopted’ by Ethiopia’s Oromo community in the city.

But apart from these details, Gibson has remained out of the public eye, with no known social media presence.

While some details and characters are altered in Apple Cider Vinegar for storytelling purposes, the core truth remains: Belle Gibson built a wellness empire on deception, preying on vulnerable people searching for hope.

Whether or not the real Belle will pop up now in response to her portrayal in Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix, remains to be seen.

She Went Out For A Walk. Then Drogo The Police Dog Charged.

Ayanna Brooks and her boyfriend, Joseph Burroughs, were walking her dog in Washington, D.C., when a Maryland police K-9 bit her. Jared Soares for The Marshall Project

Growing up, few Black families in Ayanna Brooks’s neighborhood had dogs. A vicious attack reminded her why.

By Maurice Chammah and Abbie VanSickle

Feature Filed 10.15.2020 6:00 a.m.

Late one night in December 2018, Ayanna Brooks and her Siberian husky, Neptune, took a stroll with her boyfriend after his bartending shift. On a patch of grass near a CVS, they let Neptune roam off-leash. Then the sound of sirens filled the air. Police were chasing several men who had bolted from a stolen car.

It was a rare enough sight in their gentrifying Washington, D.C., neighborhood that Brooks, who was 27 and worked in real estate, recorded video for an Instagram story. “Yo, this is so unexpected!” she said. Wanting to avoid any police drama, she and her boyfriend, Joseph Burroughs, who are both Black, put Neptune back on his leash and turned to head home.

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But before they could get too far, a police car from nearby Takoma Park, Maryland, pulled up. Out hopped a police dog, which Brooks immediately noticed was “butt naked”—no leash, no harness. She heard the handler shout, “Drogo, get down!” Then she saw the dog disobey the order and trot around the car. She knew from training Neptune that this was a bad sign, and assumed this was the kind of dog capable of serious harm.

She felt Neptune tug her as an officer pushed her out of the way. She lost her footing and fell against a hedge. As she slid to the ground, she saw the K-9 bolt in a wide arc—he was coming for her.

Brooks tried to stay still, thinking that any sudden movement might make Drogo more aggressive. Even if she got up, she’d never outrun him. Her sense of time slowed as she closed her eyes and listened to the officers’ shouts, steeling herself for whatever was coming.

But nothing could prepare her for this pain. Brooks felt the dog’s teeth rip her pants and tear into her muscle. She let out a piercing scream. “It was like being stabbed multiple times simultaneously, four little knives in my leg,” she said. “I could see his teeth in my leg.” She heard an officer shout Drogo’s name, but he just re-adjusted his grip—four more little knives.

She wondered, “Am I about to die?”

Across the U.S., as many as 15,000 dogs are employed by police departments, and although many sniff for drugs, bombs and bodies, a significant portion are trained to bite. Every year, police dogs latch onto thousands of Americans—some of them accused of violent crimes, but others wanted in low-level, non-violent cases.

And still others, like Ayanna Brooks, are innocent bystanders.

Since 2011, K-9s have bitten at least 40 people the police were not pursuing, according to an analysis of data and thousands of pages of police records, court files, medical studies and other documents, carried out over the last year by reporters from The Marshall Project, AL.com, IndyStar and the Invisible Institute.

Many law enforcement experts say dogs can be crucial tools for officer safety, helping them find and hold dangerous suspects, and resolve situations that might otherwise turn deadly. “It is much safer to have that dog engage that suspect, at a distance, without the officer being right there,” said Pat McKean, a handler and trainer with the Mobile Police Department in Alabama. “It helps officers go home at night.”

Trainers said that although bites can be difficult to watch, if a dog is properly trained, any injuries should be minimal.

But with little state or national oversight, K-9 units have received scarcely any scrutiny, even as troubling cases have piled up. Since 2016, at least two people have died after they were attacked by police dogs. Many survivors have faced reconstructive surgeries, disfiguring scars, infections requiring hospitalization and years of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Among modern policing tools, dogs have an especially dark history. They attacked Black civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s, and a century earlier dogs were used to hunt and terrorize enslaved people. A few recent studies have found that some police departments used K-9s disproportionately against people of color.

“It’s as if you were issuing officers guns that you knew, every once in a while, would just randomly fire,” said Georgetown law professor Christy Lopez, who examined police dog use against Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, while at the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014. “I do not think we would do this if we thought of policing as something that impacted primarily White communities.”

For victims of police dogs, the bite is often just the beginning of the story. Many seek redress in court and run up against numerous hurdles. Ayanna Brooks’s legal options were worse, ironically, because she was not the person the cops were chasing.

With Drogo’s jaws still clamped on her shin, and officers struggling to pull the dog off her, Brooks’s instincts kicked in: She wedged her thumbnail, sharpened to a point, past Drogo’s teeth and into his mouth.

The dog let go of her leg, only to sink his teeth into her thumb. Brooks yanked her hand back, giving an officer a split second to drag the dog away. She stood up and tried to walk, but quickly fell to the ground sobbing.

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“I can’t apologize enough to you,” said Drogo’s handler, Jessica Garrison, according to body camera footage.

“Her dog just freaking took off,” another officer told a colleague. “Bit the shit out of a citizen.”

When a police dog charged at Ayanna Brooks, she wondered, “Am I about to die?” Afterwards, her mother obtained police body camera footage. Takoma Park Police Department, courtesy of Koko Austin

Brooks’s boyfriend rushed Neptune home. Then an officer took the couple to a hospital, where doctors found four bite marks on Brooks’s shin, along with a puncture wound in her thumb. She says she moaned and whimpered as a doctor picked off bits of flesh. Doctors often avoid sewing up such bites, given the risks of infection, but her wounds were severe enough to require 21 stitches.

As Brooks lay in the emergency room, her mother, Koko Austin, burst in. Knowing her daughter’s fear of needles, Austin held her hands while doctors sutured her wounds.

Many victims of police violence have no idea how to investigate what happened to them. But Austin worked for a federal agency and knew that such an incident would produce a paper trail. She grilled the sergeant on duty and secretly recorded parts of their conversation. He told her Drogo had been in service for a year with no known problems. “There’s a first time for everything,” he said in the recording. Around 4 a.m., right after Brooks was discharged, her mother drafted a request for public information from the department.

Brooks needed two weeks off work to recover—the first week she couldn’t walk, and she needed a cane for nearly two months. During that time, the police reports and body camera footage arrived, and mother and daughter pored over the material.

In one memo they obtained, Garrison, the dog handler, admitted that she had been distracted by a fellow officer’s orders, which allowed Drogo to escape her car without a leash. Drogo initially obeyed her, she later explained in a court affidavit, but was excited by the lights and sirens and probably stopped being able to hear her.

But in Garrison’s account, and those of other officers, it was clear the police remembered the incident differently than Brooks and her boyfriend did. Garrison wrote that the couple stepped in Drogo’s way, placing themselves between him and their own dog, and both kicked in Drogo’s direction. She wrote that even after Drogo bit Brooks, her boyfriend kept kicking at his face, making it harder for Garrison to pull the dog off.

Brooks and Burroughs deny this account. Garrison is no longer with the department and declined to comment for this story, but in a court affidavit she did agree that Brooks tripped.

Reading the officers’ accounts, what offended Brooks the most was the depiction of her own dog. The officers wrote that Neptune barked and snapped in Drogo’s direction, which “enticed” him. There was no evidence of this in the bodycam footage. “My dog has never done that,” Brooks said. “I take great pride in him being well trained, because I know how it is as a Black dog owner.”

Brooks with her dog, Neptune, in Washington D.C., in September. She was bitten by a Maryland police dog nearly two years ago. Jared Soares for The Marshall Project

Race had long shaped her experiences as a dog lover. She’d been the only Black child she knew growing up who had one as a pet, and after college, as her neighborhood gentrified, she was often the only Black woman at the new dog parks.

After receiving Neptune as a birthday gift from Burroughs, in 2017, she decided to train him herself, and she realized her dog had to be, in his own way, twice as good. He once caught a stranger’s Frisbee and the man kicked him, claiming he was being aggressive. “White people tend to think that Black people’s dogs are violent,” Brooks said. “I can’t afford to have my dog out here acting the fool.”

While recovering at home, she found Drogo’s Instagram page. In some of the posts, she said, it looked like he received laughs and encouragement when he didn’t obey his handler.

“How is it that my dog, with home training, is more obedient than this dog that they pay thousands to train?” she said. “I’ll train the dog!”

Named for the fearsome Dothraki warrior in Game of Thrones, Drogo had become a star of the Takoma Park Police Department’s Twitter account, hanging out with Girl Scouts and posing with a figurine of the Marvel character Groot.

The 2-year-old Belgian Malinois-German Shepherd mix was born in the late spring of 2016, and city records, obtained by Brooks’s mother and a local official, show he spent the last four months of 2017 with dogs from several departments, in a training run by the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland.

Police dogs are usually imported from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic through American middlemen and cost departments tens of thousands of dollars to buy and train. In a December 2017 email to her colleagues, Garrison, herself new to K-9 work, wrote: “Most of the dogs were green (that means they know very little), and fresh from Europe.”

Drogo, whose two breeds are favored by police for their strength and desire to hunt, was “cross-trained” in detection, and received a “Top Dog” award for his skills in “tracking, obedience and apprehension.” In March 2018, a suspect threw a gun into some bushes and Drogo helped find it. In November, he found a robbery suspect hiding under a bridge.

Since there are no national standards for training or utilizing police dogs, and no national tracking of their use, it is difficult to compare departments. Law enforcement experts said each case must be examined in context. But that year, Drogo and other dogs were involved in 49 deployments, according to a city report. Given that Takoma Park has fewer than 18,000 residents, this appears to be a higher rate of police dog use for that year than other agencies that provided data to The Marshall Project and partnering newsrooms.

City officials say Takoma Park formed its own K-9 unit in 1991 to better control how such dogs were used within its borders. The canine unit in Prince George’s County, which at the time included part of Takoma Park, faced an FBI investigation and more than a dozen lawsuits, including one from a woman who was mauled in her bed and needed four surgeries on her scalp and tear ducts.

Takoma Park’s own department instituted detailed procedures for using K-9s. In an emailed statement, City Manager Suzanne Ludlow called Brooks’s encounter an accident and said it was the first such incident in the K-9 unit’s nearly three decades in operation. Afterwards, the department reviewed its policies and procedures and found no problems, Ludlow continued, but still re-trained all K-9 staff and “added a layer of supervision to ensure best practices continue to be followed.”

Kyle Heyen, who has trained police dogs around the country and served as an expert witness in court, said a K-9 can be well-trained initially, but lapse if the training isn’t maintained, especially through exposure to chaotic situations. Many handlers transport their dogs with leashes already on, he explained, so they can’t jump out of the car as Drogo did: “That’s the snowball falling to the ground and starting to roll.”

Heyen said with proper continued training a dog can be “the most economical, resourceful piece of equipment law enforcement has.”

Some critics see the risks as simply too high, arguing that even in the best of circumstances, there is no way for a dog to distinguish on its own between a suspect and a bystander. (Even the Takoma Park officers briefly wondered whether Brooks or her boyfriend were suspects in the car theft.) “You’re letting an animal decide how to use force,” said Don Cook, a California lawyer who has spent decades suing law enforcement agencies over dog bites. “It can’t make that decision, and you’re going to have consequences.”

In the weeks after the attack, Brooks had nightmares and spells of throbbing pain, she said. Then came the insecurity about the unsightly scar on her leg, especially as the weather warmed and others wore shorter dresses and swimsuits. Brooks, along with her boyfriend and mother, all recall at least one officer saying the department would pay her medical bills, but never did. Ludlow, the city manager, wrote that incidents leading to potential legal claims against the city are referred to the city’s insurer, and “city staff are aware of this process.” Brooks said her own insurance didn’t cover her costs.

A local official in Washington, D.C., who saw the incident on the news, asked the city’s police department to investigate, since it took place in their jurisdiction. The department sent its reports to a federal prosecutor, who determined there was not evidence to charge any of the officers with a crime.

The police dog, named Drogo, bit Brooks on her thumb and leg. These photos were taken less than an hour after the attack. Courtesy of Ayanna Brooks

Throughout 2019, the family worked with a lawyer, Eric Rosenberg, who argued in a state lawsuit that Garrison should have warned the couple that Drogo was leaving the car, something she had done on other occasions, according to police records.

But he told the family it would be difficult to win: A Maryland jury would need to find Garrison’s failures were grossly negligent or even intentional. Garrison’s lawyer argued that she wasn’t liable for an accident stemming from a mistake.

Brooks would have also faced an uphill battle in federal court, where the doctrine of “qualified immunity” often provides cover to police officers. In addition, jurors tend to be sympathetic towards dogs—experts call it the “Lassie effect”—and some judges have ruled that accidental victims like Brooks have fewer rights than suspects when it comes to excessive force.

In 2015, Mara Mancini was standing on her porch in Indianapolis when a police dog, looking for someone else, dragged her to the ground, biting her arm and leg. She was pregnant, and her son was born dependent on the narcotics she was prescribed after the attack. A judge dismissed her lawsuit, even while admitting the officers involved showed a “grievous lack of discretion.”

Given the difficulties of winning in court, many victims of police dog bites agree to settlements.

In 2017, Pittsburgh police responded to a mistaken report of burglary, and a dog bit the renter, Robert Aldred, who had been asleep in his bed. His puncture wound became infected, requiring several hospital trips. “I had no witnesses,” he said, “so it was me against them.” Afraid of losing a trial, he took a settlement for $16,000. He said roughly half went to his lawyer and the rest was a “drop in the bucket” of his medical bills.

Earlier this year, Brooks lost her real estate job due to the pandemic, and there was no telling when a court could hold a trial. Takoma Park offered to settle and she agreed. She declined to give the exact amount and said it was in the high five figures, enough to cover her legal and medical bills, with a little left over, but “nothing to change my life.”

The settlement made the local news just as protesters were taking to the streets nationwide, following the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. A former member of the Takoma Park City Council, Seth Grimes, argued that disbanding the K-9 unit would be an easy show of faith by city officials ahead of deeper discussions about policing. A group of advocates collected more than 200 letters. Other cities are seeing similar efforts; officials in Salt Lake City recently suspended the use of dogs during arrests after a Black man was attacked while on his knees.

This month in Takoma Park, a city council-organized task force on “reimagining public safety” will begin meeting, and the K-9 program is on the discussion list.

As her wounds turned to scars, Brooks found she wasn’t afraid of dogs so much as of sudden dangers like getting hit by a car or a bullet. One day, a man, perhaps with mental illness, was yelling in a park and she found herself crying. “I try to encourage her any way I can,” said Burroughs, her boyfriend. “I usually don’t feel it, but then when I talk about it I realize I have trauma from that night, for what happened to her.”

Brooks planned to be a member of her mother’s wedding party in September 2019, and they negotiated about the length of her bridesmaid dress, making sure it would cover her scar, which still made her self-conscious.

But as the day approached, Brooks says she was overcome with dread, afraid of being bombarded by people she didn’t know well, of being expected to be open and warm and face questions about the incident. “Everything felt like pressure, any sort of family or friend gathering,” her mother said. “And that’s never been her.”

At the last minute, Brooks pulled out of the wedding. Her mother was devastated, but also understood how long trauma can last. She had spent months daydreaming scenarios in which she’d managed to protect her daughter from the police dog. She’d often stare, from a Starbucks across the street, at the hedge where her daughter fell. “Since that day, I carry a folding knife in my pocket when I go walking,” Austin said. While out with her own dog, she encountered a pitbull without a leash and started screaming. “It had this look, like it didn’t know what it had done wrong.”

Brooks will soon undergo one more surgery to smooth a lump in her leg and minimize the scars, which a surgeon told her will always be there. But she said she also hopes to become a “walking, talking testimony that if this happens to you, you can still love dogs.”

After all, one of her greatest comforts throughout her recovery has been Neptune, who seemed to grow even more affectionate in the wake of the attack. He’d scoot his backside up to the couch, so she could lean down and wrap her arms around him—a “Neptune Hug,” she called it.

After the attack, Drogo was put in remedial training to practice following orders. He passed a new exam, but the city kept him out of service “out of an abundance of caution,” according to Ludlow, the city manager. She said the dog now lives with Garrison, who left the department in April 2020. Ludlow declined to comment on whether her departure had anything to do with the Brooks incident. The department now has a single K-9 at work.

As Brooks continues to heal, she’s been thinking about how much her Black peers feared dogs growing up. “I don’t think people see the generational trauma, the people who can’t get dogs because mommy got attacked during the civil rights era,” she said. Scholars have made similar conjectures about such fears being passed down, and Brooks noted how her own trauma spiraled out to her mother and boyfriend.

Brooks hopes to use her experience to promote an end to K-9 units, not just in Takoma Park. “I don’t think even criminals should have dogs sicced on them,” she said. “If contributing my voice to a cause can spark change, to outlaw this usage of dogs in the future, to help someone else not miss their mother’s wedding, that’s worth it to me.”

Additional reporting by Michelle Pitcher and AL.com’s Challen Stephens and Ashley Remkus. Video editing by Celina Fang.

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