Auckland woman harassed for six weeks over missing dog

Nina printed and distributed posters in the area where Gracie was last seen, not expecting that her phone number could be used to harass her.

“He just gets this kind of sick satisfaction…he calls me over and over again for six weeks.”

Nina said she also received a call from someone claiming to have found her dog, who agreed to meet her in a New World parking lot.

“I was so happy when Gracie came home and when I pulled up it was a group of boys and they started barking at me. They didn’t have my dog… it was such a shock.”

Nina pretended not to notice the boys’ barking because she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of a confrontation.

She said she tried to get CCTV footage of the incident from the supermarket, but the boys were out of camera range. .

Nina told me Herald she provided police with multiple phone numbers and recordings of threatening messages and an officer twice dismissed the case as not serious.

“She (said) I want you to understand that this goes in the pile, but it goes in the bottom of the pile (under) the real crimes that are committed, the serious crimes.”

Nina could not understand that harassment and threats of blackmail and animal cruelty were not a serious police matter.

The police did not respond Herald questions, but confirmed that they were “in the early stages of investigating multiple hoax calls to a person in connection with a missing animal.”

“The police takes these types of reports seriously,” the spokesperson said.

Jaime Lyth is a multimedia journalist for the New Zealand heraldwith an emphasis on crime and breaking news. Lyth began working under the NZ Herald masthead in 2021 as a reporter for the Northern lawyer in Whangarei.