Jon Johnson Photo/Gila Herald: The Graham County Sheriff’s Office helped a man retrieve his stolen dog after the man located it Monday.
By Jon Johnson
GRAHAM COUNTY – It has been said that a dog is man’s best friend. For a Graham County man, he was reunited with that friend on Monday after having gone missing for months.
According to a Graham County Sheriff’s Office report, a man informed a deputy that he had located his dog that had previously been stolen while he was at work. The man said he had walked by a trailer off E. Swift Trail and spotted his dog with the residence’s occupant, Vicki Jeanne Garrison, 58.
The man said Garrison used to live on the same property where he lives but moved around the same time his dog went missing. He also advised that Garrison was denying the dog she had was his.
Initially, Garrison told the deputy that she didn’t have the victim’s dog and that the dog she had was given to her by a friend. However, she wouldn’t say the person’s name because she didn’t want her friend to get into trouble, according to the report.
When the deputy asked why the friend would get into trouble, Garrison allegedly advised that the dog did indeed belong to the victim and said she was concerned over its living conditions. She said the dog was kept in a kennel with several other large dogs and that it was pregnant with her dog’s puppies and she should have a legal right to the puppies.
The deputy told Garrison that she was in illegal possession of the dog and she agreed to give it back to the victim as long as he promised to take care of the dog. The victim then retrieved his dog.
By the time the case was resolved, however, Graham County Dispatch advised that Garrison also had two warrants for her arrest, one of which was out of Safford Municipal Court from 2017 and stemmed from writing a bad check.
When the deputy attempted to place Garrison under arrest, she allegedly tried to pull her door shut. The deputy took hold of Garrison’s wrist to take her into custody but she advised that she couldn’t go to jail because she didn’t have anyone to take care of her adult special needs daughter and that the deputy “just needed to leave her alone.”
The deputy informed his sergeant, who advised since neither of the warrants was for felonies and because of her situation with her daughter, it was decided to release Garrison. She was informed that she still needed to take care of her warrants and she reportedly said she would do so.
