KANSAS CITY, KAN. ? The stress of being mauled by dogs apparently took the life of a 71-year-old woman as she tended her garden, authorities said Friday as a man who said he was the dogs’ caretaker was charged.

Derrick D. Lee, 32, of Kansas City, Kan., was held on $100,000 bond on one count of involuntary manslaughter, prosecutors said.

The victim, Jimmie May McConnell, once told a neighbor she feared that the dogs – believed to be pit bulls – from a nearby home were “going to get me.” She usually carried a cordless phone while working in her backyard because the dogs would bark and rattle a fence, relatives said.

On Thursday, the elderly widow made one last desperate call to her son-in-law, Leon Barner.

“They got me – call 911,” she told Barner, who could hear the dogs attacking in the background. She was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Preliminary autopsy results indicated McConnell died of a cardiac arrhythmia brought on by the trauma of the attack, Wyandotte County coroner Alan Hancock said.

McConnell had extensive bites on her limbs and torso, “but not one of the bites were such that you could say one was responsible for her death,” Hancock said.

The bite marks will be examined by an expert to determine if more than one dog attacked McConnell.

Animal control officers tranquilized the dog in McConnell’s backyard and took it away. A second dog was taken from the house next door.

Police would not confirm that the dogs were the ones responsible and were trying to determine the dogs’ breed. But neighbors identified them as coming from a home next to McConnell’s and believed they were pit bulls.

Lee, on his way into court for a hearing in an unrelated case Friday afternoon, told The Kansas City Star he had nothing to do with the attack.

Lee said he had lived at the house where the dogs were found but hadn’t been staying there for three months. He would return to the house to feed one of the dogs and another dog – the one involved in the attack – was a stray that would come up and steal food. He didn’t know who the dog belonged to and thought it lived by a nearby creek, Lee said.

One dog was still attacking McConnell when rescuers arrived Thursday. Firefighters needed an ax and a long pole to pull it away.

Pit bulls are banned in Kansas City, Kan.

Five recent pit bull attacks in nearby Independence, Mo., have injured three men.