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.
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.
Feefee the cat’s family is deeply frustrated at the lack of answers about their cat and the lack of urgency by the company in trying to locate her after an Amazon delivery driver stole the 13-year-old tabby on July 21.
After a 10-day saga in which tan Amazon driver stole their cat — and Amazon did little to help recover her — a Washington family has been told the feline is gone, and has been offered stuffed animals in her stead.
Feefee the cat was taken from the Ishak family’s driveway in Everett, Washington, on July 21. Footage from a motion-activated security camera shows an Amazon delivery driver crouching in the driveway and petting Feefee, then driving off.
A representative from Amazon’s customer service department confirmed the driver took the cat, but has not helped reunite Feefee and the Ishaks beyond giving the family an email address that law enforcement can use to contact the company.
At first, an Amazon rep told Ray Ishak that the driver — who has not been named by the company — contacted law enforcement to return Feefee. However, neither the Everett Police Department nor the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office said they had any record of anyone approaching them about surrendering a cat.
An Amazon customer service representative told the Ishak family that the driver “contacted the police to return your cat.”
Amazon declined to put Ray Ishak in touch with the driver or to tell him the general area where the driver lives, so he might contact local law enforcement there.
The story changed on the morning of July 30, when the sheriff’s office told Ishak that the driver now says Feefee “allegedly escaped a few days ago,” Ray Ishak told PITB.
“They will not tell me where. If I could find out the vicinity I’m pretty sure I could have found the cat,” Ishak said. “I asked the sheriff’s deputies how I can find out the area and the only way is for the driver that stole the cat to tell me.
“I asked them to have her text me or call me from a blocked number or [create] a temporary email, just to tell me where it is because [the police] can’t tell me. It has to come from her and she has refused to do so so far. I fear that [Feefee’s] gone.”
PITB has reached out to Amazon and will update this post if the company responds.
In the meantime, while Amazon will not assist Ishak in trying to recover Feefee himself, a customer service representative asked the Washington man for a description of the 13-year-old tabby “so they can send me a stuffed animal that looks like her,” Ishak told PITB.
“I am serious,” he said, adding that he’s kept copies of the email correspondence with Amazon’s customer service department.
An Amazon customer service representative said the company would do “everything we can to investigate” and offered to send stuffed kittens “that look like” Feefee for the family’s grandchildren, who are close to the cat. Credit: Ray Ishak
As we wrote in our earlier post about the incident, Amazon has handled the case as if it were a dispute over a returned item or a delivery problem, even asking Ishak to rate his experience with the company’s customer support immediately after informing him they can’t give him more information. The company has not taken active measures to reunite the Ishak family with their cat, and has refused to provide any information about the driver, even vague information that could help Ishak find Feefee.
“What baffles me is that no one seems to understand that this is a CRIME and we the people who were hurt by this crime are being kept in the dark when we should be able to find her,” the family wrote in response to Amazon’s most recent reply.
The language reflects the deep frustration the family has felt over the incident and the company’s response.
“I just pray we find her alive. I am also tired of getting the brush off, generic emails and no information on our case.”
An Amazon driver playing with Feefee in the Ishak family’s driveway before driving away with the cat. Credit: Ray Ishak
If the driver is telling the truth and Feefee escaped, finding her quickly is critical. The vast majority of house cats do not do well when forced to fend for themselves, and Feefee has been a member of the Ishak family for 13 years, since she was a kitten.
If the driver is not being truthful and still has the cat, there’s no way for the family to know, and no indication Amazon or law enforcement can be convinced to find out if she’s telling the truth.
As one of our readers wrote in response to our previous story, few things are more heartbreaking than someone stealing a family’s well-loved cat. The saga has been stressful for the Ishak family, and has undoubtedly taken a toll on Feefee, who was taken from the only home she’s ever known. Feefee suffers from asthma, Ray Ishak said, which is why she was allowed to spend time outdoors immediately outside the family’s home.
Ray Ishak said his family was gathered this weekend for his son’s wedding and he had to tell his grandkids, who are particularly close to Feefee, that the cat was elsewhere. That quickly backfired.
“The emotional distress for me having to lie to my grandkids that the cat is safe and fine,” Ishak told KING5, a Seattle NBC affiliate, earlier this week. “Then, watching my granddaughters cry after they found out because they heard us talk about it. It was a double whammy from every single front.”
This is not the first time a delivery driver has stolen a pet, and not the first time an Amazon driver has done so.
In 2021, a driver for Uber-owned Postmates stole an 11-month-old ginger tabby named Simba from a Colorado family’s driveway after delivering a package. Postmates was similarly reticent to help the victims, and the family was never reunited with Simba.
In 2020, a 23-year-old delivery driver stole a Minnesota woman’s cat from outside her home and repeatedly denied taking the 12-year-old tabby until, three months later, he wrote an apologetic letter admitting he nabbed her, felt guilty and tossed her out of his truck later the same day.
In 2022, an Amazon driver stole a Michigan family’s dog. The pup was returned four days later.
Earlier this year, an Amazon driver tried to steal a family’s dog after admiring the pup and telling the family he wanted a puppy of his own. The family caught the driver in the act, and the driver did not escape with the dog.
On July 3, a FedEx driver stole a French bulldog named Tori after delivering a package to her owner’s home in North Carolina. The driver, 44-year-old Kimani Joehan Marshall, left Tori in his truck as he continued making deliveries and the pooch died as temperatures pushed well into the 90s with high humidity. Marshall dumped Tori’s body by the side of a road and the family continued to post missing flyers and search for her until July 10, when police confirmed their dog was dead. Marshall remains in jail on $50,000 bail and faces a felony cruelty to animals charge as well as larceny and possession of stolen property.
Most recently, an Amazon Flex driver allegedly stole an Austin, Texas woman’s dog on July 25. The woman, with help from friends and online sleuths, tracked the driver to his home 50 miles away and was able to recover her dog after confronting the man with evidence — including video from a neighbor’s security camera — showing he’d taken the pup.
That’s not a comprehensive list, and the cases that make the news involve pet thefts caught on camera. Victims who don’t have security or doorbell cameras generally have no recourse, and thefts by delivery drivers won’t make the news unless the victims take their stories to local newspapers or TV news stations, or local reporters discover reports by checking police blotters. The latter situation is becoming increasingly unlikely as so-called “news deserts” — locales not covered by any local media — expand with every newspaper that folds and every round of newsroom layoffs.
We hope someone in Amazon management is paying attention and can help the Ishak family get Feefee back. After all, who wants Amazon drivers delivering packages to their homes if the company allows those drivers to steal from customers with impunity?
As we wrote previously, this isn’t a customer returning a sweater or complaining about a late package, and it shouldn’t be handled that way. Feefee is a living being with emotions, and she’s been part of the Ishak family for 13 years. The very least Amazon can do is have a compassionate and empowered manager call them, apologize profusely, and vow to do everything possible to reunite the family with their well-loved cat.
Top image of an Amazon delivery driver in a Prime van courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Pain In The Bud 