Park Slope – Pain In The Bud

Someone had stolen Jabal and Park Slope wasn’t having it.

The three-month-old kitten went missing on Sept. 10 and when his human, 8th St. Mini Mart owner Imad “Jimmy” Innab, checked the store’s surveillance cameras, he saw a man and a woman grab the white-and-cream moggie from the sidewalk in front of the store as he was opening up. The last images of Jabal showed the kitten struggling in the man’s grip as the couple walked away with him.

Customers, including one who called the kitten “the patron saint of Jimmy’s store,” were incensed and immediately sprang into action. On a Park Slope subreddit, neighbors shared information and identified the couple, while customers plastered the neighborhood with missing flyers featuring Jabal’s image.

As for Innab, he offered a $500 reward and said he’d take the kitten back “no questions asked” as well as decline to press charges if the couple brought him back.

For a few days it looked like Jabal wouldn’t be seen again. Locals online feared the worst, that Jabal may have been sold to people who operate dog fighting rings (where cats are used as “practice” for the aggressively trained mutts) or abandoned someplace dangerous.

But neighbors recognized the woman, who has since been identified as 58-year-old Mary Sierra, and urged her to bring the cat back. On Monday Innab received a call from Sierra, who claimed she thought Jabal was a stray and promised to return him.

A man and a woman are walking on a sidewalk. The man is holding a small white dog, while the woman smiles beside him. They are dressed casually and surrounded by a suburban street environment. — A still from a surveillance camera showing the sidewalk in front of 8th St. Mini Mart. Credit: Jimmy Innab

Sierra’s son-in-law brought the kitten to the local precinct. Later that morning an NYPD officer came to the store holding Jabal and returned him to Innab.

“I cried,” Innab told The Gothamist, explaining that Jabal was a gift from a friend after his previous mouser and pet, Victoria, died at 17 years old. “ I put him down, and he started to sniff his bed, and his chair, and all of his toys.”

As for Sierra, she was arrested and charged with petty larceny, criminal possession of stolen property and companion animal stealing, the New York Post reported. The first two are misdemeanors under New York penal law, while the latter is a violation under the state’s Agriculture and Markets Law, which is a throwback to the days when most animal-related disputes concerned farmers and disagreements over ownership of livestock. Most US states have not updated those laws in more than a century despite drastic changes to the culture around companion animals and the ways Americans value their pets.

It’s not clear why Sierra’s companion, the man seen holding the cat in the surveillance footage, was not charged.

A man smiling while holding a white cat with grey markings in his arms. — Jabal reunited with Innab. Credit: New York Post

Sierra, who spoke to the Post after she was released pending a later court date, said she was going to “sue them for accusing me of stealing,” although it wasn’t clear if she meant she would sue the police, Innab or locals who identified her online from the surveillance video.

“I’m an animal lover. I got three rescue dogs,” she said. “I went to jail yesterday for this s—t. I went to jail! They locked me up, they locked me up for this s—t. I did not steal the f—ing cat.”

It wasn’t immediately clear when Sierra is due back in court.

Innab said he will no longer allow Jabal, which means “mountain” in Arabic, to roam outside the bodega and plans to get him a new collar and microchip.

Innab, 60, has operated the store for 40 years and is well known in the community. He was distraught when Jabal was taken, and credits his neighbors and friends for making sure the kitten was returned to him. The community’s reaction underscores the relationship neighbors have with local bodega owners and their cats, many of whom have become famous thanks to popular social media accounts documenting the friendly mousers.

“Clearly he’s become symbolic of something much larger,” one neighbor told the New York City ABC affiliate, WABC. “And the community did rally because it seemed such an unnecessary event.”

A beloved bodega cat is back where he belongs a week after a thief snatched him from the store.

The cat, Boka, is actually a kitten. Majeed Albahri, owner of Green Olives Deli in Brooklyn, adopted the little guy in January and in seven months the all-gray feline has become a familiar face in the neighborhood, where people are used to seeing him sitting on Albahri’s shoulder as he works the register, or napping on the nearest convenient pile of newspapers.

Boka “brings life to the store,” Albahri said, noting people stop by just to give Boka a head scratch.

But on July 29 a guy “skulking around” outside the store took a liking to the neighborhood mascot and swooped him up. Albahri didn’t know what happened until he checked the store’s surveillance feeds and saw the thief in action.

Boka’s abduction mobilized an entire neighborhood, generated headlines in the New York papers, segments on local TV news and posts on neighborhood blogs. The thief must have felt the heat, because he contacted the deli through an intermediary and returned Boka to Albahri safe and sound.

On Aug. 5, exactly a week since Park Slope’s favorite feline was filched, Albahri posted online to share the good news.

“Best news I’ve heard all week,” one neighbor wrote, while another one posted: “Yes Boka! We missed you!”

Others urged Albahri to invest in some AirTags, the Apple-made locators that were designed for keys, phones and other easy-to-lose items, but have been repurposed by some as pet trackers.

For those unfamiliar with city life, particularly in New York, bodegas (Spanish for wine cellar or warehouse) are corner stores that stock grocery staples, snacks, and usually some sort of combination deli/salad bar. They also sell everything you’d find in a convenience store, from newspapers, magazines and gum to cigarettes and cigars.

Because there are very few grocery stores in New York, and because suburban-style grocery shopping isn’t an option for millions of people who don’t own cars, bodegas are essential in neighborhoods that would otherwise be “food deserts.” (Some sociologists consider such neighborhoods food deserts anyway, especially if the local stores don’t offer fresh produce, dairy and meat. Most bodegas do.)

Bodega cats occupy a legally precarious but widely loved position in the fabric of New York. They’re pets, but they also have primal jobs that call back to the original reason humans and felines began their partnership thousands of years ago: rodent control.

Technically they’re illegal according to the city’s Department of Health, but the New York Times estimates there are more than 10,000 bodega cats across all five boroughs. In a city that produces viral videos of rats dragging full slices of pizza down subway stairs, and rodents run rampant at night, bodega owners are faced with two choices: Accept the rodents and pay a fine, or get a cat and pay a fine, but have their stores free of rodents.

With the fines for rodent infestations and cats both around $300, bodega proprietors say the choice is easy, and cats have become ubiquitous. New Yorkers have created petitions to get the Department of Health to relax the rules on bodega cats, with no luck so far.