Thieves fake seizure to steal puppies from Colorado pet store
Photo by Chris Melzer/picture alliance via Getty Images
(CENTENNIAL, Colo.) — Colorado pet store suffered its second robbery this month on Friday as thieves faked a medical emergency in order to steal two puppies, according to the owner of the store.
Perfect Pets, located in Centennial, Colorado, has been the target of multiple puppy thefts, with the latest occurring on Friday at approximately 2 p.m., said owner Jens Larsen.
Larsen told ABC News three gentlemen walked into the store, looking “sketchy,” and one of them appeared to be on drugs and “talking belligerent to employees.”
The man suddenly fell to the ground, with other customers and store employees quickly rushing to his side, shown in video surveillance footage.
Larsen said it “looked like he was having a seizure” and an employee began to call 911.
As the other people crowded around the man, Larsen said another man walked toward the back of the store, opened a case of puppies and grabbed two male English bulldogs.
An employee spotted the thief with the two puppies and workers tried to block him from leaving, even tackling his leg before one worker was kicked in the face, Larsen said.
The criminal tripped and fell to the ground, dropping the puppies, but he was able to scoop them up and run away, Larsen told ABC News.
Multiple people chased after him, but were unsuccessful in catching the culprit, Larsen said. The suspect was able to escape in a gold Cadillac Escalade, Larsen said.
“The guy doesn’t care,” Larsen said. “He’s not stealing merchandise, he is stealing living animals and doesn’t seem to really care for their well-being.”
A suspect has been arrested for the theft, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office told ABC News. More details were expected to be released on the theft Monday, law enforcement said.
In the previous theft, Larsen said a woman stole a puppy from the store and hid the pet in a baby stroller on Feb. 12. Another woman then grabbed a puppy and ran out the door moments later. The individuals, who were caught on security camera footage, have still not been caught, Larsen said.
Resale opportunities for the dogs appears to be the motive for these incidents, Larsen said.
Bulldogs, especially French bulldogs, are a common targets for thieves. French bulldog puppies can go for anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000, Tom Sharp, the CEO of American Kennel Club Reunite, told “Nightline” last year.
Larsen said Perfect Pets is offering a $1,000 reward for the return of each dog.
Infared image taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department heat-seeking drone shows location of a 78-year-old man who went missing on Dec. 23, 2024. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
(LOS ANGELES) — High tech and quick thinking are being credited in the rescue of a missing 78-year-old man after sheriff’s deputies deployed a heat-seeking drone and found the Southern California resident 80 minutes after his family reported him missing, officials said.
The Christmas week rescue unfolded in Malibu on Monday night as temperatures in the area plunged into the 40s, upping the urgency of finding the missing man quickly, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD).
A family called 911 about 7:30 p.m. Pacific time to report their elderly relative, who suffers from dementia, had vanished after leaving his residence around 4:30 p.m. to fetch his mail, sheriff’s officials said.
“The temperature was 48 degrees and dropping. Deputies swiftly initiated a search and rescue operation, broadcasting a description of the missing person over the radio and entering his information into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) missing persons database,” according to the LASD.
As the sheriff’s department’s homicide bureau and missing persons unit were notified, the deputies who arrived at the scene quickly deployed a drone, or an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), equipped with infrared technology to scour the area from the sky, the sheriff’s department said.
“At approximately 8:50 p.m., a UAS located the missing person lying in a field of thick brush about a quarter mile away from his residence. Fortunately, he had only sustained minor abrasions from a fall and was transported to a local hospital for treatment and further evaluation,” the sheriff’s department said.
Sheriff’s officials said the rescue operation highlighted “the importance of swift action, teamwork, and innovative technology in locating missing persons, especially those who are vulnerable due to medical conditions.”
The LASD has been using drones since 2017.
As of Dec. 18, sheriff’s deputies had deployed drones in nearly 60 incidents this year, including 12 search and rescue operations, according to online department records. Drones have also been used by the LASD in at least 45 high-risk tactical operations, including 13 incidents involving barricaded suspects.
(BOSTON) — A federal judge in Boston said Monday he will continue to pause the Trump administration’s plan to offer a deferred resignation buyout to tens of thousands of federal employees until he issues a ruling on a preliminary injunction.
Three federal employee unions — with the support of 20 Democratic attorneys general — have argued that the Office of Personnel Management’s deferred resignation offer is an “unlawful ultimatum” to force the resignation of government workers under the “threat of mass termination.”
The pause, ordered by U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr., came just hours ahead of the program’s midnight deadline, which itself was extended by four days following a temporary restraining order that continues to remain in effect.
During an hour-long hearing Monday, a lawyer for the Department of Justice framed the deferred resignation offer as a “humane off-ramp” for federal employees before President Donald Trump enacts sweeping changes to “rebalance and reorganize the federal workforce.”
“President Trump campaigned on a promise to reform the federal workforce,” DOJ attorney Eric Hamilton said, outlining Trump’s plan to reduce the size of the federal government and his return-to-office executive order. “We understand these announcements may have come as a disappointment for some in the federal workforce.”
Hamilton argued that any further delay of the buyout would cause irreparable harm because the Trump administration plans to enact the next steps of reshaping the federal government as soon as the buyout window closes.
Elena Goldstein, a lawyer representing the unions that brought the challenge, hammered the Trump administration for attempting to enforce an “unprecedented program” with a “slapdash exploding deadline”
“For the last two weeks, confusion has rained for millions of career civil servants,” Goldstein said. “This is a program of unprecedented magnitude that raises questions about the rationality of OPM’s decision-making.”
The buyout offer, part of Trump’s effort to trim the size of government through billionaire Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, was sent out two weeks ago in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road” — the same language Musk used when he slashed jobs at Twitter after taking over that company in 2022.
The offer, from the Office of Personnel Management, offered full pay and benefits until September for any federal employee who accepted a deferred resignation by Feb. 6, with no obligation to work after they accepted the agreement.
While Goldstein acknowledged that Trump has the right to downsize the federal government, she emphasized that OPM has not gone through any of the steps necessary to carry out such a sweeping move — including analyzing the cost and benefits of their approach, evaluating its impact on the government’s function, and accessing potential conflicts of interest for Musk. She added that the exact terms of the buyout are “shifting” for thousands of employees who have gotten inconsistent guidance from their agency.
“OPM appears to be making this up as they are going along,” she said. “When the government wants to decide, there are ways to do this correctly … none of that happened here in the two weeks since they enacted this program.”
Arguing for the government, Hamilton criticized the plaintiffs’ argument as “legally incoherent and at odds with their theory of the case,” because a further delay of the buyout would “insert more uncertainty” into the lives of federal employees.
While the plaintiffs raised concerns that the buyout program violates federal law by using money that Congress never appropriated, Hamilton attempted to push back on the claim that the buyout changes the government’s financial obligations.
“Nothing about the voluntary resignation changes anything about the federal government’s financial obligations. It just changes what employees are expected to do and not do during their period of employment,” Hamilton said.
Goldstein argued that a preliminary injunction is necessary to prevent what she said was an unlawful offer to reshape the federal government while the Trump administration continues to “put additional pressure on employees.”
“This is an unprecedented action taken on an unprecedented timeline,” she said.
Just hours ahead of Thursday’s original deadline for employees to accept the offer, Judge O’Toole — who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton — temporarily blocked the offer until Monday so he could consider issuing a temporary restraining offer pausing the order.
“I enjoined the defendants from taking any action to implement the so-called ‘Fork Directive’ pending the completion of briefing and oral argument on the issues,” Judge O’Toole said in his ruling. “I believe that’s as far as I want to go today.”
The Trump administration, in response, “extended” the deadline for the offer, which more than 65,000 federal employees have already taken.
“We are grateful to the judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who refuse to show up to the office can take the Administration up on this very generous, once-in-a-lifetime offer,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week.
The unions who brought the lawsuit argued that Trump exceeded his authority as president with the offer, which they described as a “slapdash resignation program.”
According to the plaintiffs, Trump’s offer violates federal law, lacks congressionally appropriated funding, and does not offer employees reassurance that the president would follow through with the offer. Their claim in part relies on a federal law from the 1940s called the Administrative Procedure Act that governs how federal agencies create and enforce rules.
“In the tech universe, ‘move fast and break things’ is a fine motto in part because they’re not playing with the public’s money, and it’s expected that most initiatives are going to fail,” Loyola Marymount law professor Justin Leavitt told ABC News. “Congress knows that, so in 1946 they basically said, ‘When agencies do stuff … they have to be careful about it. They’ve got to consider all aspects of the problem.”
The plaintiffs also argued that the buyout is unlawful because it relies on funding that Congress has yet to appropriate, violating the Antideficiency Act.
“Defendants’ ultimatum divides federal workers into two groups: (1) those who submit their resignations to OPM for a promised period of pay without the requirement to work, and (2) those who have not and are therefore subject to threat of mass termination,” the lawsuit said.
Lawyers for the federal government have pushed back on those claims, arguing that Trump has the legal authority to provide the buyout for employees within the federal branch, and that any further delay would do more harm than good.
“Extending the deadline for the acceptance of deferred resignation on its very last day will markedly disrupt the expectations of the federal workforce, inject tremendous uncertainty into a program that scores of federal employees have already availed themselves of, and hinder the Administration’s efforts to reform the federal workforce,” DOJ attorney Joshua E. Gardner wrote in a filing last week.
Roughly half of California’s farm workers are undocumented immigrants. Via ABC News
(LOS ANGELES) — California’s Central Valley is considered “America’s bread basket,” supplying a quarter of the nation’s food and producing 40% of its fruits, nuts and other table foods.
However, roughly half of California’s farm workers are undocumented immigrants, so President Donald Trump’s plan to fast track mass deportation and the images of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country have spread fear on these farms.
It started shortly before Trump returned to office on Jan. 20. The U.S. Border Patrol raids in Central Valley’s southern Kern County — dubbed “Operation Return to Sender” — hit close to home for people in the region.
“Op Return to Sender brought 78 undocumented noncitizens, many w/criminal records, out of the shadows,” USBP Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino wrote in a Jan. 16 post on X.
The people arrested didn’t all have criminal records, and immigrant rights groups say fear is trickling through undocumented workers.
“You have families that are being ripped apart. You have community members that are living in fear,” immigration attorney Ana Alicia Huerta told ABC News. “They’re scared to go outside. They’re asking neighbors and friends who have status to drive them back and forth because they’re concerned that they may be targeted.”
Advocacy groups say the raids have prompted some farmworkers to stay home, which could reduce the harvesting of produce and other goods.
“It’s not easy to live in fear, when we are the ones putting food on your table,” farmworker Xochilt Nuñez told ABC News in Spanish. “Since the beginning I’ve said, do not bite the hand that feeds you.”
Nuñez has worked in the fields of Central Valley for 16 years, and said she loves the feeling of the soil, the smell and “la libertad” — the freedom of the fields.
“We are glad to be at work at 6 a.m. and have an hour commute,” she said. “We do it happily, from the bottom of our hearts. Because we love this soil.”
She noted that immigrants are “living in terror” because they’re concerned immigration officials will come to the fields. She also expressed concern that farm workers staying home for fear of deportation or actually getting deported may result in produce prices increasing due to a labor shortage.
“Can you believe there are people who have been here for more than 35 years, working, paying taxes and do not have the right to a work permit?” Nuñez said. “We need to be empathetic with those people. Because they do not rest — and the economy lays on their backs.”
The United Farm Workers Foundation, the largest union representing America’s farmworkers, held a virtual press briefing in January after Border Patrol detained at least two of their union members.
“Both members had lived and worked in the United States for over 15 years,” they said. “One leaves behind two children under the age of 10, and the other leaves behind four children between the ages of four and 10.”
Elizabeth Strater, national vice president and director of strategic campaigns for the UFW, said that a report claiming 75% of farm workers were staying home from work is not accurate. She noted that the workers can’t afford to miss work, especially since it is peak harvest season for citrus.
“Farm workers are enduring great anxiety after the chaotic immigration sweeps targeting farmworker communities earlier this month. They still have to provide for their families,” she said. “Regardless of status, they all deserve better than to be profiled and terrorized for simply doing the work it takes to feed this country.”
Some immigrant families are too afraid to leave home to even get groceries, prompting groups like Latino nonprofit Celebration Nation to set up food drives. Its founder, Flor Martinez Zaragoza, told ABC News the group will be feeding farm workers every day for the next six weeks.
“It’s very ironic that we’re feeding those that feed the nation because they’re very food insecure,” she said during a food drive in Fresno.
In Kern County, rapid response groups are teaming up with immigration attorneys like Huerta — she emphasized that people have rights regardless of their status.
“If you’re arrested, don’t sign anything,” she said. “Ask to speak to an attorney.”
Huerta said this isn’t the first time her community has had to fight for their humanity. Central Valley is home to famed labor organizers and civil rights leaders like her grandmother Dolores Huerta, along with César Chávez.
Three generations later, their grandchildren are carrying on that legacy. Andrés Chávez does so as the executive director of the National Chavez Center.
“If there’s anything that the last week has taught us, it’s that it’s going to be a long four years. And so folks like myself and groups like ourselves are having to prepare for this long-term fight,” he told ABC News. “And I think back to my tata César’s words — he would always say, ‘You only lose when you give up.'”
