Dog's family demands $740,000

The family of Cassius, the dog killed by leaking electricity from an old NStar Electric lamppost site, said last night it had turned down an unspecified offer of "comfort money" from NStar and is demanding $740,000 from the utility or it will sue. The family said it picked the dollar figure because it equals NStar chief executive Thomas J. May's annual salary.

Paul and Dee Dee DeVito of Allston, whose 13-year-old son Kyle was walking Cassius on Western Avenue when the dog was electrocuted last Tuesday, said they had initially demanded $1.4 million, the size of May's most recent annual bonus. The DeVitos agreed to seek the lower figure after NStar balked.

"We didn't want the DeVito family to appear greedy," their lawyer, John G. Swomley, said at a packed press conference last evening where the family disclosed its $740,000 demand.

But, Swomley said, after three dog deaths in Boston since 2000 blamed on so-called stray voltage, the family wants a sufficiently harsh financial sanction to force the utility to get serious about resolving the problem once and for all. "We tried to come up with an offer that had some poetry to it and that would say in very clear terms to NStar: We don't want this to keep happening," Swomley said.

"It is not designed to make the De- Vitos a wealthy family."

After keeping $200,000, plus enough to pay for four years of college for Kyle and his brother Alec, 10, the family would donate the rest of its settlement, Swomley said, to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Animal Rescue League.

Swomley said NStar was contacted last week, and since then the family has presented a series of settlement offers to the utility in hopes of avoiding a lawsuit. NStar spokesman Michael Durand would not comment on any aspect of the utility's talks with the DeVitos.

"NStar feels very bad about what happened last week, and we know that the family is going through a very difficult time," Durand said. "We've reached out to them to talk about ways that we can help make things right. It would be inappropriate to discuss any details of our conversations."

Durand also refused to say what NStar paid owners of two other dogs that were electrocuted by stray voltage, Labrador retriever Oscar, who was killed in Charlestown in February 2004, and Laszlo, a red vizsla who died when he walked over an electri fied manhole cover in the South End in February 2000.

City and utility officials have also investigated roughly a dozen other reports of dogs being shocked, including a December 2003 episode in Mission Hill that dog owner John Toner said has left him with $11,000 in hospital bills for treatment of injuries he suffered that NStar refuses to pay.

State regulators have not definitively nitively concluded that Toner's medical claims stemmed from the shock that injured his German shepherd, Blue, on Delle Avenue.

At a press conference held by the family yesterday, Kyle DeVito, an 8th grader at St. Columbkille School, was visibly grieved as he described the death of Cassius, his year-old boxer, as they were walking near the WGBH-TV (Ch. 2) studios. DeVito unwrapped a cloth bandage to show news photographers where Cassius had bit his hand, drawing blood.

"He started to shake and yelp, and he fell down," Kyle said. "I think he bit me to tell me: Don't touch that spot. You could get electrocuted, too."

Paul DeVito, his father, said:

"He's hoping that with all this attention, in the midst of the tragedy, something good could come of this." The DeVitos want any settlement with NStar to include legally binding language requiring the utility to conduct more thorough, regular, preventative maintenance.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino yesterday named a joint city- NStar task force to find what Menino called "a final solution" for stray voltage problems. The group will particularly focus on identifying locations like the one where Cassius died, where streetlights have been removed but underground electricity has not been turned off or begins leaking. Stray voltage is a particularly serious issue at this time of year, when slush or puddles with residues of salt used to melt snow and ice can help conduct electricity that would otherwise dissipate into the ground.

People wearing rubber-soled shoes and boots normally are protected.

The state Department of Telecommunications and Energy, which has come under fire from utility unions and Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly for what they call its failure to aggressively monitor NStar's safety and reliability record, has decided to hire an independent consultant to audit a key NStar stray voltage report issued last April.

In that report, NStar said that "99.99 percent plus" of the 24,000 manhole covers and other structures its inspectors checked for stray voltage last winter after Oscar's death -- including one 24 feet from where Cassius later died -- showed no signs of electricity. But DTE chairman Paul G. Afonso said, "We need to have absolute confidence in that document," and so an independent engineering consultant will be hired by the DTE to scrutinize NStar's reports.

Because the level of stray voltage depends on how much salt-laden slush is on the ground, it is possible for inspectors checking a site on a dry day to miss a problem that develops after a snowfall and the application of salt.

NStar's May declined to attend Menino's City Hall press conference, sending a company lawyer, Mark Reed, in his stead, and no one from NStar attended the De- Vitos' press conference last evening. May issued a statement vowing to "find these sites and make sure they can never become a problem." Ten NStar inspectors armed with voltage detection wands were at work in Boston yesterday, and 10 more will join them today, the company said.

May cautioned, however, that in the "rare instances" when cables to former streetlights have failures that lead to stray voltage, "we would have no signal, no blinking streetlight to signal trouble.

For that reason, they are as troubling as a home without a smoke alarm."

NStar has admitted that because it failed to cross-reference its streetlight records with the city's list of current and former streetlight locations, NStar missed an undetermined number of spots that could have live, underground cables. Menino said there are not "hundreds of sites, but there's a number" that need to be identified and checked out.

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.