Lawyer for pit bulls in UWS mauling claims attacked chihuahua started infamous dog fight

They started it! The owner of a killer pit bull is claiming that his dogs were the real victims of a tiny chihuahua who was mauled by the bigger canines on an Upper West Side sidewalk in a case that made headlines last month.The pit bull’s owner lawyer, Ikiesha Al-Shabazz, made the claim after a Friday court hearing ordered after the owner defied a judge’s ruling by not surrendering the two large dogs to police — and she also shared a supposedly exculpatory video of the brutal attack.Despite the key moment at the start of the fight still obscured in the clip, she said it showed the chihuahua provoking her client’s 100-pound dog.“They decided that they were going to lie,” Al-Shabazz said in a Manhattan courtroom hallway on Friday.A visibly frustrated civil court judge issued an arrest warrant minutes earlier for her client, Joseph Columbus, because he failed to appear that morning, and had defied court orders to surrender the two dogs.Al-Shabazz told reporters that “this case is not as it seems,” and claimed text messages reveal the tiny dog’s owner admitted to lying about who started the canine carnage.“I was there for the original plan to say the bite was the Pit bull, not Penny,” the messages allegedly sent from Penny co-owner Lauren Claus read, “we dropped that plan like an hour after we left the precinct.”Al-Shabazz claims that the messages are between Claus and an Upper West Side restaurant worker she was chatting with for surveillance video of the gruesome and bloody attack last month, and has filed them as an exhibit in the lawsuit.“So you lied too?” the worker allegedly texted back.Reps for the owner of the Chihuahua did not comment.“Yes,” the response reads.

“We didn’t feel good about it.”“Penny was the initial aggressor,” said Al-Shabazz.“Does that mean a dog deserves to be attacked — absolutely not.”Claus did not respond to a request for comment on the hearing or on the messages by the time of publicat...