TAMPA, Fla. – A Tampa dog owner is thankful for her Ybor Heights community after her neighbors worked together to track down her stolen dogs.
“My family and I are super grateful for the neighbors we have!” dog owner, Nelly Gonzalez, told FOX 13. “Who would have thought a neighborhood would come together to help find some puppies. Such a blessing to have such fantastic neighbors around.”
The backstory:
Gonzalez told her neighbors the puppies, who were outside in her backyard, went missing Friday morning.
“My heart dropped. I was like, Oh no, the puppies are missing!” neighbor Tanisha Johnson said. “I want to do everything I can to help her find her puppies.”
Many of the neighbors were familiar with cute pups.
“Like what you do with any dog: You let ’em go outside, let ’em use the restroom, give ’em like twenty minutes, and then they go back inside,” neighbor David Rogers said. “They weren’t left outside.”
Johnson checked her security cameras, which showed two teens opening Gonzalez’s backyard gate and walking away with the pups around 8:30 a.m. Friday.
“I was thinking, wow, like it’s daylight, why would someone do that first off? Why would you steal someone else’s puppies?” Johnson said. “And number two, why would you do it in the daytime, you know?”
Johnson shared her security video with all her neighbors, so they knew what to look for. She and Rogers started asking around to see if anybody had seen the dogs.
“It was real easy to show people because the pink hair just stood out,” Rogers said of the female suspect in the video. “So that made it a lot easier and thank God everybody has cameras.”
What we know:
To her surprise, Johnson said she spotted the two teens, who were wearing the same clothes in the security video, walking by her home the next day.
“I did confront them because maybe they could give the puppies back. Maybe they would do the right thing,” Johnson said. “But they ended up just walking by, and they didn’t say anything. They looked at me, and then they tried to hide their faces, which I already have on my camera, so that didn’t really make a difference.”
Later, the female teenager walked by a second time. This time, Johnson and her boyfriend followed her.
Other neighbors, including Rogers, joined them. And a short time later, the group spotted Luna outside a nearby house. They called out to the dog, who came to them.
Courtesy: Tanisha Johnson
But Orion was still missing.
That’s when two teenagers approached the group and said they’d return the dog in exchange for money. So Rogers gave them $100 and got Orion back.
Courtesy: Tanisha Johnson
“What is money compared to life?” Rogers said. “I mean, I get it. It’s a dog. It’s not a human, but it’s life. And (the dog owners) were crying about it, so that meant something to them. Money I can make any day, but you can’t replace that.”
Dig deeper:
Tampa Police confirmed they arrested a 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl and charged them with burglary and petit theft in the case. The pair was transported to the Juvenile Assessment Center.
The Source: Information from this story was gathered by FOX 13’s Ariel Plasencia through interviews with neighbors and information from the Tampa Police Department.