Neighbor’s Dog Attacked/bit My Dog & Husband

Location: California, USA

My husband and I moved to a new home in a relatively unsafe area (mix of trendy and shady areas in the neighborhood; not the type of place you’d walk around at night).

We haven’t encountered anything bad for the first couple months and most people we’ve talked to are decent, but… recently my neighbor’s dog (from a house that shared a fence with us in the back yard) jumped over the shared fence and attacked our dog while my husband was watching our two dogs in the backyard. My husband quickly went to pry the dog off of our dog and in the process got bit too.

My husband was able to get our dogs inside and hold off the neighbor’s dog. Eventually the neighbor hopped over the fence and got their dog while making awkward joke-ish statements about his dog needing to go back to the shelter to alleviate the situation and explained that this (his dog hopping the fence) happens sometimes??? (Which makes us concerned that 1. They’ve been in our yard unknowingly to get their dog and 2. They’ve known about this and did nothing). They also kept apologizing.

The part that makes me worry is that we live next to this person and dont know if theyre sane/reasonable or unsafe. The reason i say that is the neighborhood isnt the safest/known to have gangs and the person apparently had a lot of tattoos and face tattoos and this dog was unfortunately a pittie…. I dont think pitties are inherently bad; what i think is that bad irresponsible people purposely adopt pitbulls because of their reputation and train them to be aggressive. I hate to profile people, but the neighborhood, mixed with the face tattoos, and the pitbull make me worried that this is not a good person.

The reason I’m writing this post is I want to know what I can do legally & I want to know what I should do given the possibility that this person is a bad person that we have to continue to live next to/this person could be a bad person that tries to make our life a living hell if we upset them/report them……

If i could have it my way, what i want is the dog to be rehabilitated/trained or rehomed and rehabilitated there. I do not want the dog euthanized. I would also like the neighbor to pay for my husband’s medical bills/dog’s vet bills. I’d also like that they make the fence higher or put barbed wire (I don’t know if that’s legal).

In short, I want this to never happen again (without hurting the dog) and I want our bills to be paid for because it’s not fair that we have to pay for them…. My husband also is having difficulty using his right hand now which he uses for work….. what can we do?