A Story of Two Brothers Trip to Las
Vegas April 8, 2006
Mike and I had to go to Las Vegas to
pick up Atlas this past weekend. He has been with “Grandma
Ginny” since late February so she could show him in Arizona and
Las Vegas. We figured that we could make a weekend of it and
watch the show so Mike could test out his new camera equipment.
This would work better for everyone because Ginny needed to fly
to Portland to be with her brother who will be undergoing heart
surgery.
We left the house on Saturday morning and arrived on the
outskirts of Las Vegas near 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon. We
stopped and filled the motorhome with gas. I tried calling Ginny
on her cell phone as we were leaving so I could find out where
we could meet up with her. We had really been missing Atlas and
were ready to see him. Ginny didn’t answer he cell phone so I
left a message on the voice mail letting her know that we would
be at the show site in about a half hour. At the same time, I
got another call and saw that it was Ginny calling me. No phone
conversation that starts with, “You aren’t going to believe
this…” is ever going to end well.
This
is when we learned that Ginny’s van had been stolen from the
parking lot of the show site and Atlas and his brother, Quincy,
were both in the van. Ginny had taken the boys out to the van
and then went back to her set up to get another dog so she could
go to her hotel. When she came out, the van and dogs were gone.
Ginny’s purse, cash, identification and credit cards were gone
in the van also. We told Ginny we were on the way and we arrived
about twenty minutes later.
The police were still not there yet and it had now been about an
hour. Dean Tiltgen, Quincy’s owner, and his father were there
with Ginny waiting for the police. Dean plays hockey with the
Phoenix Roadrunners and he had a game in Las Vegas that night and
decided to come watch Quincy at the dog show also. We all stood
around together helplessly waiting for the police to arrive. All
we could do was pray, so the five of us joined hands in the
parking lot and said a prayer and asked God to lift the burden
and bring the boys back home safely.
The UNLV police finally arrived at about 5:30 p.m. and the
officer then spent a good hour with Ginny taking her
information. I tried once to get the officer to understand that
we were prepared to offer a $2500 reward right then if he wanted
to get that out. He told me that he would finish getting the
information from Ginny and then would follow protocol for
getting information dispatched. I walked away a bit in disbelief
that he did not understand my sense of urgency. The person who
had stolen the dogs now had a better than two hour jump on any
law enforcement action. After the officer left the site, I think
we were all left with the misguided assumption that this
information would then be provided to Las Vegas Metro Police and
that all the police in the area would be looking for the van and
the dogs. This turned out to be the farthest thing from the
truth. We later learned that the information was not released to
Las Vegas Metro P.D. until after 9:00 a.m. on Sunday.
In the mean time, we made a call to Carie May-Bowers, GSCA’s
Health & Hereditary Chairman and HT-Z official. I knew she was
member of all of the GS lists and rescue lists. I asked her to
please put something out to all the lists that the dogs were
missing and that people should cross-post to all of their
friends, any rescue lists, vets, anyone they knew in Las Vegas.
Ginny in the mean time was working with the AKC representative
and officials from the kennel clubs to get the information out
to the animal shelters about the dogs. Neither dog were wearing
a collar because they were crated, however, both are
microchipped and we were hoping that if they were found a
shelter or vet would contact us.
Gay Glazbrook who owns a litter sister to the boys learned of
the situation. I’m not sure whether Ginny called her or whether
she learned about it from one of the other folks at the show or
from the posting on a list. At any rate, apparently Gay has some
connections in Las Vegas. Steve Schoor who is very well know and
respected in Las Vegas made some calls to local broadcast media
and a reporter came out on Sunday about 10:00 a.m. to do a story
so we could get it on the news. Kersten Lindquist from KVBC
Channel 3 in Las Vegas did an excellent story and assured us
that this would be on the 5, 6 and 11:00 p.m. news. Kappy Zahn
graciously allowed her dog to be filmed by the camera crew so
that people would know what a Giant Schnauzer looked like.
I then worked on getting a logon to the internet through
ePetpals.com so that I could be connected to the lists and
email. I called Carie and asked her to put together a reward
flyer for me and send it out through the lists. I then had to
call her back because they didn’t want a show picture put on the
flyer believing that unscrupulous people would demand more money
to provide information on the dogs. Carie revised the poster and
then revised it again when we learned the correct license plate
number for Ginny’s van. I then had to figure out how to get the
Word file out of the laptop and over to Kinkos for printing.
We have a Sony laptop and the camera’s memory stick fits in the
front. I put the file on the memory stick and Dean and his dad
took me to Kinkos to make posters to hand out. Not as easy as it
sounds. There was no way to get the file off the memory stick,
but the desk attendant said that if I could email it to him he
could print it. I called Mike back at the motorhome and at that
time the WiFi connection was too slow because it was trying to
download all of the emails from the lists. I then logged on to
our email server at Kinkos and tried to email it myself. The guy
said he didn’t get it. I then resorted to printing a black and
white directly from the email. Not the best copy, but the best I
could do at the time. While we were doing that, Dean got a call
from Ginny. Quincy has been found. Someone had found some of the
things from her van nearby and started calling some of the
numbers until it was all pieced together (by whom I am not
certain) but there was a “black Airedale” around. Ginny went to
the gentleman’s location. Quincy came to her when he wouldn’t
let anyone else near him.
Quincy, and Memo
Dean, his dad and I left Kinkos
right that second and headed to the show site. Ginny wasn’t back
yet but Mike and I got directions to where they had found Quincy
so we could start looking for Atlas. This was around 1:00 p.m.
and there was plenty of daylight left. Mike and I left the show
site in our motorhome with Dean following. We then split up to
keep looking. Mike and I spent the next three plus hours
cruising the neighborhoods near South Nellis and Harmon in the
East Las Vegas area. No luck. Feeling pretty despondent, Mike
and I headed back to the show grounds to wait for the news and
to see Quincy. I then sent an update that Quincy had been found
and the area where he was found to the email lists.
Everyone gathered in our motorhome to watch the news. The story
was great and ran almost 4 minutes. Pretty good coverage in my
estimation. My cell phone number was listed as the contact
number in case anyone had any information. I got my first call
within 2 minutes of the new story being broadcast. Someone
called and said they saw the story and that he had seen one of
the dogs running loose with a flexi-type leash at Fremont and
11th Street near the Bunkhouse Bar at 2:00 a.m. that morning.
Given that this was not close to where Quincy was found, we
believed this to be Atlas.
No more calls. We decided to get our plan together so we could
get a good jump on things in the morning. We figured we better
get a couple hundred flyers printed and then rent a car so we
could cover more ground than we could in our motorhome. Mike and
I went back to Kinkos and printed flyers while trying to call
places and see if we could rent an SUV since we had Abby with us
and hopefully would be able to fit Atlas if we found him. No
luck on rentals since it was around 7:30 p.m. on Sunday night.
We scrapped that plan and said we would call the closest
Enterprise rental because they opened at 7:30 a.m. and have them
deliver a car to us in the morning. We headed back to the show
grounds.
We were very tired because neither one of us slept more than 15
minutes at a stretch the night before. We had thought of all of
the awful things that people will do to dogs. This is hopefully
the closest we will ever come to knowing how it feels to have a
child abducted and have to worry about what happened. At this
point, we were even hoping to find a body just so we could have
closure. We still couldn’t even think about getting sleep so I
called Carie again. She gave me numbers for Mike Eyler who has
adopted two GS from HT-Z rescue and he just retired from Las
Vegas Metro Police. I know Carolyn and Carie had been trying to
get his numbers so they could put us in touch with him. They
knew he would be happy to help out. I called Mike Eyler and he
said that he had already made contact with patrol officers and
they knew what was going on and he assured me that people were
looking.
Mike Eyler took information about what had happened, where
Quincy had been found and I also told him about the tip that I
got after 5:00 p.m. news. He said that he was pretty sure that
it was the van they were looking to steal, and that the dogs
just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He
also said that the area of Fremont and 11th was not the best
part of town, but he knew that there was a lot of foot traffic.
He said that if the reward poster got out that he was sure if
someone knew something they might be inclined to do the right
thing. I asked him if he had the poster and he said he did. He
said he would print it out and take it to the patrol officers in
the Fremont Street area so they could hand it out and knew that
they would do so gladly. I felt better knowing this would get
more exposure for Atlas than we would be able to do even in the
morning.
My Mike and I finally sat down and were watching television, now
waiting for the 11:00 p.m. news to come on. My phone rang at
about 8:30 p.m. and a woman said that a friend of hers told her
about the news story. She said she was a bartender at “The
Bunkhouse” and that one of their patrons, an indigent type, had
brought the dog in at around 7:00 a.m. that morning. She knew he
was too nice a dog for that neighborhood and was sure someone
would be looking for him. She also said that all of the patrons
really liked him and wanted to take him home. She was concerned
that someone would just take him because he had been tied out
back and that folks would drink and then go outside to sit with
the dog. She had a friend take the dog to her house. I asked her
if she had to dog with her and she said she did.
I now got her address and directions and Mike and I set out
again in the motorhome to get Atlas. I called Ginny and had to
leave a message for her that we were on our way to pick up
Atlas. I then called Mike Eyler and let him know also. When we
got to Jonnie’s townhouse, we had to call her because we
couldn’t get the motorhome to her exact house number. Mike
walked Abby up while we were talking on the phone. I had to grab
a collar and leash. The last thing I needed was to find Atlas
and have him blast by me and be running loose again.
Atlas seemed most happy to see Abby (our rescue bitch), but
jumped all over us also. I thanked Jonnie and her friend
profusely. Told them the story and wrote a check. Jonnie said
that she wasn’t aware of a reward and if it weren’t for the fact
that the guy who brought Atlas in needed to go see family and
didn’t have any money, she wouldn’t have taken it. I told her
that I would have insisted anyways. Now the guy can go see his
family because we were now reunited with ours.
While I was writing out the check my phone rang again. It was
Ginny calling to tell me that her van had been recovered. She
had not played her voice mail so she didn’t know that we had
gotten the call. Needless to say, Ginny was elated that both
dogs were safe. We got back to the show grounds and called Carie
to put it out to the lists and then called the Channel 3
newsroom to thank them and let them know that without them we
wouldn’t have had the success that w did in getting both dogs
back.
Atlas and Ginny
Neither dog was any the worse for wear. Not a mark on either one
of them, but very tired on Sunday night. All of us (myself,
Mike, Ginny and Dean) wish to thank everyone for their prayers
and for any part they may have had in mobilizing the network of
rescue people, dog people and pretty much anyone who could
contact people in the Las Vegas area to help find our dogs. I
want to give special thanks to Steve Schoor without whom we
would not have gotten the media coverage that was so
instrumental in getting Atlas back to us. I am sure I don’t have
any idea how many people did things for us in one of our darkest
hours, but I know that your prayers played an instrumental part
in having these boys returned to us. I also want to thank God
for hearing and answering all of our prayers.
Tami Stoller |