LEWISTON – It could have been a scene out of Stephen King’s “Cujo,” except the vicious dog from Maine was a 185-pound Great Dane, not a 200-pound St. Bernard.

Frazier, a 10-year-old that had been trained to hunt bears, terrorized Jan and Rini Barlow, the couple who adopted it from a rescue agency a year-and-a-half ago. The dog killed the Barlows’ 10-week-old kitten and mauled Jan Barlow’s left forearm Tuesday night before he and his wife could flee to safety.

An animal control officer used a fire department ladder truck to subdue Frazier with a tranquilizer dart fired through a second-story window. Rini Barlow, 23, asked that the dog be euthanized.

Jan Barlow, 26, was home Wednesday after being treated at St. Mary’s Regional Hospital.

“He was bit really bad. The dog bit him and shook him,” his wife said. “It went almost to the bone.”

Frazier had lunged at Jan Barlow in the studio when he tried to hug his wife after she found the dead Siamese kitten, Murphy, which was still warm.

“I kicked him and then he wanted to bite me, too, but I ran to the laundry room,” Rini Barlow said. The couple took refuge in the closed room and called police, but Rini Barlow said Frazier knew how to open a door by turning the knob.

When police arrived, the couple escaped to the front lawn while the dog barked at them from an upstairs bedroom.

While police in the yard tried to figure out how to subdue the Great Dane, Rini Barlow screamed up at her pet as it glared from an upstairs window.

“You killed my cat. You killed Murphy,” she yelled, clutching a small Pekinese named Cocoa in her arms. “Why did you do this to me, Frazier? It’s not fair.”

The dog had been acting aggressively in the last month, she said.

“He’s like our kid, but he’s gone crazy,” Rini said, saying the Great Dane had been raised to hunt bear, Rini Barlow said.

While the fictitious Cujo’s behavioral change was linked to a bite from a rabid bat, the Barlows could only speculate on what happened to their pet.

The couple had put the Great Dane on a low-protein diet and hired an animal behaviorist recently because he had been acting strangely, but the attempt to help him appeared to have failed, Rini said.

In determining Frazier’s fate, she suggested that the dog was too old to be re-trained.

“I say just put him to sleep,” she said. “I don’t want this to happen to someone else.”