Tag: police

‘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.

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 That’s not entirely their fault, as outdated laws still define cats and dogs as property with fixed monetary value, fungible assets that can be easily replaced.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.

A Colorado Woman May Have Been Killed By A Puma, But We Should Wait For The Facts

There are lots of questions but very few answers so far related to the death of a woman on a hiking trail in northern Colorado. Authorities have not confirmed a puma attack.

A woman who was found dead on a hiking trail may have been killed by a mountain lion, state authorities say.

Several hikers were making their way along the Crosier Mountain Trail in northern Colorado at noon on Thursday when they came upon a woman laying on the ground and a puma about 100 yards away from her, according to police.

The hikers made noise and tossed rocks to scare the cat off, then one of them — a medical doctor — checked the woman and found no vital signs.

They notified authorities, who launched a massive search by air and ground, closing down the neighboring trails and bringing search dogs into the effort.

The search teams found and killed two mountain lions, who will be autopsied to determine if either had human remains in their stomachs. If they do not, rangers and police will keep looking, as they say Colorado law requires them to euthanize animals who have killed humans, local news reports said.

Pumas, also known as mountain lions, cougars, catamounts, screamers and many other names, are the widest-ranging cats on Earth, found throughout South America, the west of the US, and southern Canada. Credit: Charles Chen/Pexels

It’s important to note that there are no autopsy reports so far. Police don’t know how the woman died, if she was killed by the puma spotted near her, or if the animal approached after her death.

If an investigation does determine a puma was responsible, it’s crucial to place the incident in context. The last recorded fatal mountain lion attack in Colorado was in 1999, and was not confirmed. The victim, a three-year-old boy named Jaryd Atadero, wandered away from the hiking group he was with and was never seen again.

Search efforts in the following days and weeks didn’t turn up anything, but in 2003 another group of hikers found part of Atadero’s clothing. His partial remains were later found nearby.

Police said Atadero could have been killed by a mountain lion, but there’s no definitive evidence and his cause of death remains a mystery.

Aside from that incident, there have been 11 recorded, non-fatal injuries attributed to pumas in Colorado in the past 45 years despite as many as 5,000 of the wildcats living in the state’s wilderness.

Nationally there is some discrepancy in record-keeping, but most sources agree there have been 29 people killed by mountain lions in the US since 1868. By contrast, more than 45,000 Americans are killed in gun-related incidents per year, about 40,000 Americans are killed in traffic collisions annually, and between 40 and 50 American lives are claimed by dogs per year.

Americans are a thousand times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a puma, according to the US Forestry Service.

Despite their size, pumas are more closely related to house cats and small wild cats. They can meow, but they cannot roar. Credit: Caleb Falkenhagen/Pexels

Cougars are elusive, do not consider humans prey, and the vast majority of the time go out of their way to avoid humans. Most incidents of conflict are triggered by people knowingly or unknowingly threatening puma cubs, or cornering the shy cats.

Despite that, there’s confusion among the general public. Mountain lions are routinely confused with African lions, so some Americans believe they are aggressive and dangerous.

Pumas, known scientifically as puma concolor, are part of the subfamily felidae, not pantherinae, which means they are more closely related to house cats and smaller wildcats than they are to true big cats like lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards.

Pumas can meow and purr, but they cannot roar. Their most distinctive vocalization is the powerful “wildcat scream,” leading to nicknames like screamer.

In the Colorado case, police say they believe the victim was hiking alone. Her name hasn’t been released, likely because authorities need to notify next of kin before making her identity public.

This is a tragedy for the victim and her family, and we don’t wish her fate on anyone. At the same time, we hope cooler heads prevail and this incident does not spark retaliatory killings or misguided attempts to cull the species.

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.

Credit: Diane Huff-Medina

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.

Murphy. Credit: Kathy Souza

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