A Brooklyn bodega owner is offering $500 for the return of his kitten after a pair of thieves snatched the three-month-old cat from outside his Park Slope store last Thursday.
Imad Innab, who runs the 8th St. Mini Mart, had just opened for business around 7 a.m. When Jabal, a white kitten with yellow eyes, darted out the front door for a quick sidewalk exploration. Innab soon realized the cat had vanished. A review of security footage revealed the truth: at approximately 7:18 a.m., a man and woman scooped up Jabal and fled.
The theft mobilized the store’s regular customers, many of whom had already grown attached to the young cat during their daily deli runs. One customer managed to locate the pair in Prospect Park and confronted them directly. “He saw them and he talked to them, and he says ‘You stole the cat, you stole the cat, the cat belonged to the store. It’s not a stray cat,'” Innab recounted in an interview. The confrontation ended in failure — the woman stuffed Jabal into her backpack, the man split off in another direction, and both escaped despite the customer’s pursuit. “The lady took the cat in her book bag and went to different direction and the man did the same thing,” Innab explained. “He went to the other direction and the [customer] was following them too. In the meantime, I was calling the police.”
Though police involvement and the identification of the culprits gave Innab a path to charges, he chose not to pursue prosecution. Instead, he plastered their photos on flyers around the neighborhood alongside a $500 “No questions asked” reward for Jabal’s safe return. “Just give it back you know? He was living his life here,” Innab said of the kitten. He expressed little faith in the thieves’ ability to care for the animal. “These people, they have it for like a couple of hours or something, and then just put in the street. Because they can’t even feed themselves.”
The loss carries extra weight for the Innab family. Until three months ago, a cat named Victoria had presided over the 8th St. Mini Mart for seventeen years. Her death left a void that Jabal was brought in to fill. “This was a nice home for it,” said Moe Innab, 27, Imad’s son. “He’d be on my dad’s lap all the time, and I was excited to see it every time I came. My sisters named it. So it hits home.” The kitten’s favorite resting spot, a cardboard couch inside the deli, now sits empty.
The case has become neighborhood-wide news in Park Slope. “I think the whole neighborhood is talking about it,” one local resident said, reflecting the outsized place the small bodega cat had already carved out in the community. The search effort has drawn together customers and strangers alike, with flyers spreading word of the reward and the circumstances of the theft.
