JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2013 The owner of a Jacksonville exotic pet store says a puppy and a bearded dragon were stolen from his business over the weekend.<\/p>\n
Stephen Brezil, owner of Xtreme Exotics, said four people worked together inside the store, watching employees and handling the puppy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey carried the puppy around, which we don\u2019t normally allow,\u201d Brezil said.<\/p>\n
He said one person handed the puppy to another member of the group, who carried it out of the store \u201clike he was carrying a football.\u201d The bearded dragon was later discovered missing from one of the store\u2019s cages.<\/p>\n
Brezil said he had planned to keep the puppy for his family.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole thing is devastating. I mean, I can\u2019t even believe this happened,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
One of Brezil\u2019s employees later encountered some of the group at a Boba Tea House in St. Augustine. Brezil said the employee saw the puppy in their vehicle and that the group tried to sell it to her. She recorded video and obtained the vehicle\u2019s license plate information.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this point we obviously want to get the animals back. We don\u2019t want anything to be hurt,\u201d Brezil said. \u201cWe would have appreciated that they would have just been returned, but I want to stop this from happening to anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brezil reported the theft to the Jacksonville Sheriff\u2019s Office and shared photos and video on social media. JSO declined an interview but confirmed the investigation remains active and ongoing.<\/p>\n
News4JAX chose to blur the suspects\u2019 faces because they have not been charged with a crime.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WJXT News4JAX – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2013 The owner of a Jacksonville exotic pet store says a puppy and a bearded dragon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413361,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[265,116,118,117,1415],"class_list":["post-413360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-crime","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-jacksonville-sheriffs-office"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}