crime – Pain In The Bud

A Week After An Amazon Driver Stole A Woman’s Cat, Neither The Company Nor Police Have Any Answers

Amazon says it has identified the driver who stole a California woman’s cat and is working with local police, but they still haven’t recovered the beloved pet.

You’d think it would be relatively trivial to reunite a woman with her cat after an Amazon delivery driver stole the kitty on Dec. 11.

After all, the victim’s own Amazon Ring camera system captured video of the driver walking away with Piper the cat after dropping off a package. Amazon knows precisely who the driver is, where he lives and how to contact him, because he’s a contractor for the company.

And it’s difficult to imagine how it would stretch the resources of the Lakewood (California) Sheriff’s Department to send a deputy out to arrest the guy and retrieve the cat.

The driver picks Piper up by the scruff of her neck, which could cause serious injury in an adult cat.

This wasn’t a high stakes heist by pros with a plan to disappear.

It was a local delivery driver who made an impulsive decision to steal a cat from a customer.

Do the police really think the man is hiding out in a local motel with the shades down and the cat tied to a chair, cutting out letters from a magazine for a ransome note?

Getting Piper back matters very much to Diane Huff Medina and her children, who miss the chatty Siamese mix.

It doesn’t matter at all to the police or to Amazon, which finally issued a statement calling the theft a “horrible act” and saying it was cooperating with police.

“The Amazon Flex delivery partner in question is no longer eligible to deliver to our customers,” an Amazon spokesman said.

That doesn’t help Diane Huff-Medina get Piper back, nor does it help her reassure her children that the feline, who has been with the family for six years, will be returned unharmed.

“Every day they ask, ‘Is she back yet?’ It’s hard to tell them,”Huff-Medina told local media this week.

In our last post, we noted that in cases where people were reunited with their pets, they did not wait for Amazon or the police to act. Neither has the same sense of urgency as an animal’s own family, and unfortunately police are often reluctant to devote time or manpower to these cases because pets are considered property. When the most severe potential charge is petty larceny — which takes into account a cat or dog’s monetary value, but not its emotional value — stolen pets are considered minor crimes.

Huff-Medina has done well to shame Amazon and local police by going to the media and getting Piper’s story out there. We hope she gets good news soon.

Header image via Wikimedia Commons

Once Again, Amazon Has No Answers After A Delivery Driver Steals A Pet

Amazon has not been helpful when its drivers have stolen pets from customers, treating the incidents as customer service issues.

A woman in California is in a panic after her cat went missing and her home security cameras showed an Amazon driver carrying the kitty away.

Diane Huff-Medina’s footage shows a driver bending down to pet her cat, Piper, during a delivery this weekend. After delivering the package, the Ring camera footage shows, the driver grabbed Piper on the way out, put her in his vehicle and drove off.

“I thought he was just petting her for a second, but yeah … I had to rewatch it a couple of times because it is hard to see, it’s dark, and he doesn’t carry her very nicely,” Huff-Medina told LA’s KABC. “I see her little tail and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Piper the cat. Credit: Diane Huff-Medina

Unfortunately incidents like this seem to happen regularly, and Amazon continues to fall woefully short when it comes to handling them and helping reunited their customers with their pets.

In an incident from last year when one of the company’s drivers stole Feefee, a cat belonging to the Ishak family of Everett, Washington, Amazon’s customer service representatives told the family the company could not force the woman to return the cat, and refused to give the woman’s address or even her general neighborhood to the family so they could search for Feefee.

In a similar incident from August, an Amazon driver stole Murphy, a cat belonging to Kathy Souza from Massachusetts. While Souza thankfully was reunited with Murphy, Amazon was not helpful, she said.

“I spoke with someone at Amazon who asked, ‘Is the cat worth more or less than $200?’” Souza wrote incredulously on Facebook while Murphy was still missing.

This time, an Amazon rep told Huff-Medina they’d identified the driver, but couldn’t get in touch with him.

It’s amazing that after all these incidents, Amazon still treats the theft of cats and dogs by their delivery drivers as a customer service issue, and seems to have no standard protocol for working with law enforcement to get the animals returned.

Indeed, there’s one common thread to all the stories that end happily — in those cases the victims did everything they could to find their pets and did not wait for Amazon or local police to take the thefts seriously.

In the Ishak family’s case, they spent several days posting flyers, talking to local media and driving around in a widening circle to look for the car they’d seen on their doorbell camera. That’s ultimately how they found Feefee: instead of surrendering the scared feline as she told Amazon she would, the driver simply dumped Feefee outside her own building. The Ishaks found Feefee scared and hungry, hiding in the bushes outside the driver’s apartment complex, but otherwise unharmed.

In Souza’s case, her relentless efforts to make noise and draw attention to the driver and Amazon ultimately prompted the driver to return Murphy.

So we’re hoping Huff-Medina takes a similar route, because unfortunately these cases are not a priority for the corporate behemoth, nor for local police, as most state laws consider pets property, and stealing a pet is considered a small time crime. Let’s hope there’s good news soon.

Cops: Wannabe Rapper ‘Ritually Sacrificed’ Cat To Promote Music

David Mosley wanted attention and allegedly killed a cat on camera to promote his Satanist-themed music.

What to do when you want to be a famous music artist, but your tunes are abominably awful and your gimmick is infantile?

If you’re David Mosley, apparently you beg the internet to notice you exist by allegedly murdering a cat.

The 26-year-old Bronx man was initially gleeful after sharing video and photos showing a dead cat in his Fordham North hovel surrounded by candles and a bunch of nonsense, including the word “SATAN,” spray painted on the walls.

“You should have heard the little bih squeal lol,” Mosley wrote on Instagram alongside a photo of a bloodied and dead cat in his apartment.

“I’m the king, n—a,” Mosley said in a follow-up video after mocking people who were upset that he allegedly killed the cat. “I can reach through the camera and put spells on you like that! That easily! I hexed you through the phone, through the camera. Ya’ll know I do f—ing voodoo, so don’t even call me delusional.”

Mosley during a live stream, during which he claimed supernatural powers.

A relevant question here: who adopted a cat out to this guy? I went through what felt like a CIA-level background check when I first went to adopt, and this Satanist who thinks he’s a wizard apparently had no problem just waltzing into a shelter and walking out with a cat.

Apparently angry that no one turned up to the first “show” in his illustrious music career, Mosley said he was going to take things to the “next level” with another “sacrifice” on Halloween night. In his musical endeavors he called himself Church of Ububal, with the latter word a reverse spelling of “Labubu” in reference to the viral toys.

“Be there or be square,” he wrote, per a screenshot posted to Reddit. “Like I said at my first show and no one came. But you will be at this one. Grab popcorn.”

When he got the attention he wanted, but not the reaction he wanted, he backpedaled during a live stream, claiming he found the already-deceased feline.

By that point, furious Redditors in a Bronx subreddit had closed in on his identity and exact location, and were pestering the NYPD to grab Mosley.

“Y’all are soft for falling for cheap parlor tricks” Mosley said during the live stream.

Incredibly, Bronx criminal court Judge Harold E. Bahr let Mosley walk free without having to post bail after a preliminary hearing this week, and adjourned a hearing this week after Mosley’s original attorney was not present. It’s not clear if that attorney will continue to represent Mosley.

Bahr must be confused about which decade this is. Constituents should (politely) register their displeasure with his office. People from several local cat rescues have already done so.

“We want the judge to take this seriously. We cannot wait for another crime like this to happen,” local animal welfare activist Rachel Ejsmont told News12 Bronx.

Mosley was initially charged with criminal mischief and aggravated cruelty to animals at his Oct. 30 arraignment. Activists are pushing the district attorney for more serious charges.

The court hasn’t set a date for Mosley’s next hearing after the Nov. 12 adjournment. We hope the scrutiny and his mounting legal troubles dissuade him from trying to get attention through violence again.

Lastly, I usually keep my mouth shut about this sort of thing because I know emotions run high and most people are well-intentioned, but already there are grifters latching onto this incident and using it to beg for donations for their activism, which amounts to little more than grumbling about this stuff on social media.

Be careful about who you donate to and make sure you’re giving to registered organizations with financials listed on Charity Navigator or Charity Watch. Donate your hard-earned money to groups that really do make a difference, such as the Humane Society, SPCA and local rescues that do outstanding work, like New Jersey’s Tabby’s Place. A transparent, effective charity will feature its IRS Form 990 on its website and use at least 75 percent of its revenue from donations on program spending. Be wary of “influencers,” people who say outrageous things for attention, clicks and donations, and anyone who claims they have special access to, or influence over, authorities.

Header image via News12 Bronx (screencap)

Beware Of Cat!

Want to dissuade criminals from targeting your home but can’t afford a fancy security system? A warning sign featuring Buddy’s terrifying visage will do!

Times are tough, everyone’s feeling the squeeze, and criminals are more motivated than ever to target homes that may have valuables in them.

That’s why Buddy, in the spirit of altruism (and the guarantee of extra turkey) agreed to lend his fierce likeness to the below poster. According to the Buddinese Center For Criminal Justice, homeowners who display this “BEWARE OF CAT” sign are 99% less likely to be the victims of home robbery or burglary, as criminals will simply move on to a home that isn’t protected by an intimidating, extremely ripped feline:

Alternate version with even more intimidating image of feline protector:

Cops Claim There’s Nothing They Can Do After Bloodthirsty Thugs Sicced Their Pitbulls On Beloved Shop Cat

“Harm or death to an animal caused by another animal is not a criminal matter,” even when footage shows dog owners urging their pets to attack, the NYPD claims.

The NYPD says its hands are tied after a group of people sent their pit bulls after a well-known shop cat in Manhattan and cheered as they dogs brutally ended the tabby’s life.

Freddy was the resident moggie at Michelle Flowers, a florist on Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights. The little guy was outside the shop at about 9 p.m. on July 4 when a man and two women set their dogs loose on him, then celebrated and cheered as they killed him.

The pit bull owners then “smoked, danced and ate food while taking photos and mimicking the grisly scene,” according to the New York Post. Surveillance cameras caught the attack and its aftermath, showing the three black-clad dog owners and others who witnessed the violence and did nothing.

A disgusted neighbor contacted the Cat Collective, a group of volunteers who feed and care for strays in the neighborhood, and they collected Freddy’s remains, then told the florist’s owner what happened.

“Someone deliberately set dogs on a defenseless cat while people watched and cheered,” Dan Rimada of Bodega Cats of New York told the Post.

Cat Collective is offering cash rewards to anyone who can identify the dog owners and the celebrating bystanders, but the police won’t do anything.

An NYPD spokesman told the paper that “harm or death to an animal caused by another animal is not a criminal matter,” citing a gap in the law.

A proposed bill, dubbed Penny’s law after a chihuahua that was mauled by pit bulls earlier this year in Manhattan, hasn’t made it out of committee in the New York State legislature, while New York’s city council is looking at a municipal law that would make it a crime to set dogs on other animals.

It’s actually difficult to believe nothing can be done to get justice for Freddy, Penny and other animals aside from civil cases, which can only result in monetary damages.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who is controversial to say the least for creatively interpreting the law, seems like just the kind of district attorney who could find a way to prosecute the dog owners. The fact that the authorities are outright dismissing the possibility indicates Bragg doesn’t see this as a priority.

Working with the police to find ways to get justice is Bragg’s job, as well as the job of the attorneys working for him in the district attorney’s office. At the very least, they should be able to find something with which to charge the suspects, even if it really turns out there’s no way to hold them criminally accountable for Freddy’s death.

We hope Freddy’s killers are identified and held responsible, and we hope no more pets and strays have to be killed before lawmakers at the city and state level make it a priority to close an obvious gap in the law.