LOS ANGELES – A Southern California woman is desperate to have her stolen dog returned after she was filmed going to extraordinary lengths to stop her pooch from being snatched in downtown Los Angeles earlier this month.
On Jan. 18, Ali Zacarias was eating lunch at a downtown Whole Foods with her dog Onyx when a suspect grabbed the pup from beneath the table and fled. Zacharias chased the dognapper, eventually following the thief to an automobile before the person drove right into her, FOX 11 Los Angeles reported.
“It’s hard to have them ripped away from you. I wasn’t willing to just let him go,” Zacarias said. “My last resort was to stand in front of the car and tell them not to go, and they drove right into me, and it pushed me onto the hood, and I just wasn’t going to leave the car at that point. And I held on and they took off.”
A bystander filmed the episode as a white Kia Forte transported Zacarias on its hood down Grand Avenue. The car eventually swerved and the woman rolled off, suffering cuts and scrapes in the process.
Zacarias said there were three women and a man in the fleeing Kia, all in their mid-to-late 20s. Video from the scene became widely distributed as it showed the car had a whited out license plate with only the last digit or so visible.
The stolen French bulldog has one green eye and one pale blue eye, with a mottled coat, FOX 11 reported.
Zacarias described the dognappers as “light skinned African-Americans, overweight, not huge, but just medium size.”
Since the theft of Onyx, the woman has worked tirelessly to track down her buddy, even offering to pay the thieves to have her dog returned.
“Please, just sell him back to us at this point,” Zacarias said. “Like, we don’t care about anything except getting him back. So we’re not looking to press charges, all we’re looking to do is recover our baby.”
