DogExpress
A beloved French bulldog mix suspected of being robbed from a Dallas couple’s home led to many high-tech amateur detective work by hundreds of online investigators.
The odd expression on a dog’s face led someone driving through East Dallas on Friday evening to snap photos of a 2-year-old French bulldog mix named Mabel and a man carrying her awkwardly in dirty, messy clothing.
“A guy had picked her up and was walking up and down Gaston Avenue, and someone took a photo of him,” said Andrew Sibley.
Sibley says his dog had been stolen from the fenced side yard of his apartment, and he feared he would never see her again.
“We went to the Deep Ellum police station the next morning and got in contact with a detective who said they would contact us Monday,” he said.
But within hours of Mabel’s disappearance, Sibley says someone posted the photos of Mabel and the suspected thief on a Dallas Reddit page, asking if someone was missing a dog.
Sibley saw it and responded that it was his, which led to offers of help.
“We had hundreds of people responding to this,” he said.
Those hundreds of people on Reddit and other social media sites used facial recognition websites to identify the man in the photos quickly.
Once they did, a search of mugshot websites turned up criminal convictions and a last known address at a sobriety house that just so happened to be near Sibley’s apartment.
“…found his latest address, and I showed up at noon Sunday, and it was right there,” Sibley said. “He asked, ‘is this your dog?’ and I’m like, ‘yeah.'”
Mabel was still with the man, who we are not identifying because he handed her over unharmed and claimed that he found her outside wandering.
“I’m very, very happy to have her back,” Sibley said.
But it’s all because of the compassion and hard work of strangers who Sibley will probably never meet that Mabel is home.
“Thankful, thankful to everybody; it’s a very bizarre situation with all the coincidences [and] a lot of opportunities and some luck,” he said.
in Chandigarh, India. 
