While Ali Zacharias was eating lunch outside a Whole Foods store in Los Angeles on Jan. 18, a stranger approached her and her french bulldog, Onyx. The stranger called to Onyx, grabbed his leash and put him in her car.
Zacharias thought there had been a mistake.
She told KTLA, “I didn’t think somebody was stealing my dog, I thought it was a misunderstanding, so I was like, ‘That’s my dog, excuse me,’ and she wasn’t listening.”
Zacharias followed the woman to the car, got in and saw there were four others inside. She explained that they pushed her out of the car and locked the doors.
“I wasn’t willing to have him be ripped away from me. I wasn’t willing to just let him go,” she told Fox 11 Los Angeles.
So, Zacharias got in front of the car. “They drove right into me, and it pushed me on top of the hood,” she explained. “And I just wasn’t gonna leave the car at that point, and I held on, and they took off,” she said.
This dog mom described what was going through her head as the car sped down the street in downtown Los Angeles. “As he started going faster and faster, I started to say, ‘I’m about to die. This is my death, right now, I’m about to die,’” she told KTLA. When the car swerved around a corner, Zacharias rolled off the hood.
Onyx still has not been found.
She told Fox 11, “Please just sell him back to us. At this point, 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.”