A Williamsburg couple who suffered a dog-napping got their beloved pet back last Sunday after New York pup lovers put out an all points bulletin and cops zeroed in on the purloined pooch.
Allie Caran and Zach Botham lost their French bulldog, Oliver, in a bizarre burglary last Friday and they say police went all out to recover the hound.
“The NYPD, for the first time in my life, came through in some incredible ways,” Caran said. “They treated the incident with the same severity that I felt it.”
The saga began when the couple were late getting home on Friday night because they were out buying birthday presents for Oliver. They returned to their Manhattan Avenue apartment to find the dog, and many non-breathing possessions, stolen. The couple was devastated.
“My boyfriend and I had a total meltdown,” Caran said. “It’s terrible to steal someone’s dog. He’s like my kid.”
The Williamsburgers’ friends quickly put out a call to the canine-loving community and, within 48 hours, thousands of tweets bearing the hashtag #HelpFindOliver were flooding the internet.
“The response was amazing,” said Caran, who works at Toby’s Estate coffee shop. “Every coffee shop in New York was posting about it.”
The couple canvassed in real life, too, hanging fliers everywhere they could think of until Sunday night, when police called them in to the 90th Precinct station on Union Avenue to break the news.
“They tried to surprise us when we came into the precinct, but they were so overjoyed, it was hard for them to hide it,” Botham said.
Cops would not say how they tracked down Oliver and the 22-year-old man they arrested for the dog-napping, but the rescued pup did not sweat the details, happy as he was to be reunited with his owners and to receive his belated birthday presents. A week later, though, the psychological toll of Oliver’s experience is starting to show, his owners said.
“He’s jumpy now. He sees people he doesn’t know and he freaks out a little bit,” Botham said.
The suspect is facing charges of burglary and grand larceny and cops are seeking two other men in connection with the break-in.
