Amazon delivery driver – Pain In The Bud

Grieving Family Wants Answers After Amazon Driver’s Theft Of Their Cat Ends With His Death

A Kansas City family is in anguish after an Amazon delivery driver stole their senior cat, beginning a sequence of events that led to his death. Once again, Amazon treated the situation like a routine customer service issue.

At this point it feels like the certainties in life are death, taxes and Amazon delivery drivers stealing pets.

If there’s a fourth, it’s Amazon’s predictably awful response to customers whose cats and dogs are stolen by the company’s drivers. Whether asking distraught customers how much the pet was worth, offering credit, or offering to send stuffed animals as replacements, Amazon has generally been unhelpful. This is a pattern going back years now and Amazon still hasn’t come up with a protocol to handle these situations.

A recurring problem is that Amazon treats the incidents like regular customer service complaints. Their customer service representatives aren’t trained for the possibility, they are apparently reluctant to go off-script, and the result is that the reps treat the missing pets like fungible products, as if these situations can be rectified by sending a replacement or reimbursing a customer.

That’s the last thing anyone wants to hear. Pets are companions, considered family by most Americans who have cats and dogs in their homes. Hearing “And how much would you say Fluffy’s worth?” exacerbates the frustration and worry.

In the latest incident, surveillance footage shows an Amazon driver picking up a cat named Sidney from his family’s driveway in Kansas City on April 20. At 16 years old, dependent on medication with his health failing, Sidney was near the end of his life, Marsha Reeves told the local Fox affiliate.

“I knew his time was near, and I just wanted him to be comfortable and at home when it came,” she said.

Because of the driver’s actions, Sidney’s last days were spent in distress and confusion, separated from the people who loved him. The driver surrendered him to a shelter the next day, and Sidney was bounced between shelters and animal control with his family frantically trying to track him when a veterinarian at a rescue group euthanized him.

“I cannot even imagine what he was thinking,” she said. “He did not deserve to die on a metal table with strangers poking him. He should have been at home in my arms when he took his last breath.”
Marsha Reeves, Sidney’s human

It’s a tragic and horrific end for a cat whose family wanted to fill his last days with love. They’re denied closure, and to add to the awfulness of the situation, Reeves said the mega-corporation was not helpful, at first not admitting one of its drivers took the cat, then slow-walking the response.

“I cannot even imagine what he was thinking,” Reeves said. “He did not deserve to die on a metal table with strangers poking him. He should have been at home in my arms when he took his last breath.”

We’ve written about this before, and previous cases make it clear: people who find themselves in this situation should not wait for Amazon (or any other company) to handle it, because it’s not a priority for them. In every case in which a family has successfully regained their cat, the common denominator was they took it upon themselves to lead the effort and were relentless in searching, posting flyers locally, rallying support online and making noise in local media. Sometimes even that’s not enough, but it increases the odds of a happy reunion by orders of magnitude compared to putting faith in a corporation and police.

In this case, there’s been no word from Amazon about consequences for the driver or changes to the way the company trains its delivery workforce and customer service representatives.

The driver “needs to come with a supervisor and face me and my family members who this has affected,” Reeves told the local Fox affiliate. “I think Amazon needs to be held accountable. I think this young woman needs to be held accountable. She needs to realize that there are consequences to her decision making.”

So far the company hasn’t admitted wrongdoing or offered an apology, which is consistent with cases in the past involving drivers who have stolen pets.

“Why won’t Amazon just come out and say ‘we screwed up?’”

Cat Stolen By Amazon Driver Returned To Family, Investigation Continues

The family posted a short statement on social media but refrained from offering details, citing an ongoing police investigation.

Nora the cat is back with her family.

The tabby cat was stolen from outside her West Yorkshire, UK, home on Jan. 18 by an Amazon delivery driver. Nora’s human, Carl Crowther, checked footage from his security cameras and had a clear view of the driver dropping off a package and scooping up the cat before walking off the property with her.

The incident was widely covered in UK media and while the suspect’s face was censored in news reports, an uncensored version was widely shared on social media by animal welfare groups and regular people who helped put pressure on the driver. Nora’s family worried that the kitty could experience health problems without the medication they give her regularly for a heart murmur.

In an update post, Crowther said Nora had been returned “safe and well.” It’s not clear if the Amazon employee returned the cat or if police were involved in the recovery. Crowther, citing an ongoing police investigation, said he can’t offer more details at the moment.

“Obviously we are over the moon with this outcome,” he wrote on Facebook.

Unfortunately the theft of pets by delivery drivers has been a recurring story in the news, and there are reports of Amazon drivers making off with cats and dogs going back at least a decade. While there is no official count or centralized list, it’s happened often enough to generate outrage from customers and news coverage from local and national media, which is often key to helping the victims get their pets back.

‘What Is The Monetary Value Of Your Cat?’ Once Again, Amazon Proves Tone Deaf After Driver Steals Cat

A family’s home security camera captured clear footage of an Amazon delivery driver scooping up their cat and carrying her away.

At a certain point, you’ve gotta wonder whether this is a feature, not a glitch.

After yet another incident involving an Amazon driver stealing a pet, the company stuck to its usual script by being absolutely useless and managing to offend its wronged customer.

On Monday West Yorkshire’s Carl Crowther checked his security camera footage, prompted by the sudden disappearance of his cat, Nora. The footage shows an Amazon delivery driver leaving a package at Crowther’s front door, then scooping Nora up before walking off the property with the feline.

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When Crowther called Amazon, the company handled it with the same remarkable tone deafness and lack of care that’s become its trademark in cases like this.

“Their response was disgusting, asking what monetary value we’d put on the cat,” Crowther said. “How can you put a value on somebody’s pet?”

Thankfully Crowther’s local police are taking the case seriously rather than treating it as petty crime or beneath their concern, as many US law enforcement agencies do. That’s not entirely their fault, as outdated laws still define cats and dogs as property with fixed monetary value, fungible assets that can be easily replaced. In many states, stealing a cat will result in nothing more than a low level misdemeanor charge that is pleaded down in court.

West Yorkshire police told The Guardian and the Independent that they’ve opened an investigation and “inquiries remain ongoing.”

The video has been published by several UK news sites, but oddly — perhaps due to UK law — the driver’s face is blurred out.

There’s an additional reason for urgency besides Nora’s family missing her, Crowther said. The stolen feline has a heart murmur and takes medication to manage the condition. Crowther said he’s worried she could succumb to stress between the lack of medication and the frightening abduction. Nora does not do well in new environments, he said.

This is just the latest theft in what has become a fairly routine situation for Amazon. For some reason, perhaps because of lack of training or less vigorous vetting, Amazon’s drivers have been in the news much more frequently for stealing pets than drivers for any other retailer or delivery company.

The online retail giant still seems to have no protocol for handling cases like this, with its representatives treating them like typical customer service issues. Thus the questions about placing monetary value on pets and other insensitive questions.

In cases in which victims have been successfully reunited with their pets, they took the initiative and did not wait for Amazon or the police to act.

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.

Another Amazon Driver Steals A Customer’s Cat

A Massachusetts woman hopes she’ll be reunited with her cat after an Amazon driver took the feline during a delivery.

In one respect, it feels unfair to blame Amazon for its employees stealing cats.

The company’s drivers make millions of deliveries to American homes, and the vast amount of time there are no problems.

On the other hand, this has happened so many times now that you’d think Amazon would make it a priority to tell its drivers: Do not steal cats from customers. It’s not acceptable, it’s traumatic for the cats and their humans, and it’s horrible PR for the company.

The latest incident involves a driver who was caught on camera this week stealing 18-year-old Murphy, who belongs to Kathy Souza of Somerset, Massachusetts. Security camera footage shows the driver retrieving cat food from her vehicle and chasing after Murphy, then disappearing.

Souza told a local NBC affiliate that neighbors at an AirBnB saw the driver steal Murphy. The driver allegedly told them she was concerned about the cat, that it “didn’t seem right to her and she was going to take it,” Souza said.

As of mid-morning Wednesday, Souza posted an update saying she was waiting at the Somerset Police Department, where the driver apparently agreed to return the cat.

Like so many others before her, Souza found Amazon tone deaf, minimally responsive and unhelpful.

“I spoke with someone at Amazon who asked, ‘Is the cat worth more or less than $200?'” an incredulous Souza wrote on Facebook.

A customer service representative also asked Souza to fill out a satisfaction survey, which mirrors the experience others have had when the company’s drivers have stolen pets. Amazon handles the cases as if their drivers stole or damaged property rather than taking living creatures often considered family by the people who love and care for them.

The company’s responses are similar to the way it handled the case of Feefee, a 13-year-old tabby cat stolen from a family in Everett, Washington, by an Amazon driver in late July of 2024.

In that case, Amazon offered to compensate the Ishak family by sending a stuffed animal resembling Feefee, and told owner Ray Ishak that the apologetic driver had contacted police to return the cat. That wasn’t true, and to make matters worse, the Amazon driver abandoned Feefee and wouldn’t tell the family where she’d dumped the cat. Ishak spent several days driving through his neighborhood and surrounding areas, looking for the driver’s car which was visible in his doorbell camera footage.

Ishak found his cat without Amazon’s help after a great deal of stress and effort.

Souza said she would post another update about Murphy “when I have him in my arms.”

Update, 2:05 pm: Souza has been reunited with Murphy.

In a statement, Amazon said the driver’s behavior doesn’t meet the company’s standards and promised an investigation, but a friend of Souza wrote on Facebook that it was pressure from social media posts and local news reports, not action from Amazon, that prompted the woman to return Murphy.

“Rescuing animals is honorable, but due diligence is imperative, and this woman did not do hers,” she wrote.

Murphy is well known among neighbors and doesn’t stray further than three houses from home, Souza wrote in an earlier post.

We’re glad Souza and Murphy have been reunited and this story has a happy ending.

As for the lessons learned here, anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in this situation should not wait for Amazon to act. The company won’t have the same sense of urgency, and its customer service staff aren’t trained or equipped to take the necessary steps, like liaison with local law enforcement.

In cases where people have recovered their pets, the common thread is that they took the initiative, used social media and local news to get the story out, and were relentless. Time is crucial, because in some cases delivery drivers will panic and abandon stolen pets.

Header image credit Wikimedia Commons