A Little Dog, Verizon, and Corporate Greed

[BellisimaJ.]

This  is about a topic that I ran acrosss in reading the post of a friend on TCW. The story stunned me, touched my heart. and sickened me to my core.It is about a little dog, the beloved pet of a man named Bill. But, more than that, it is about corporate greed, the greed of Verizon, Inc., and about social responsibility. Those of you who are reading this,it is my hope that you will take a few minutes from your day, contact the media, and express your outrage regarding the actions taken by Verizon, as well as contacting Verizon itself, to express outrage, and to cancel your account if you are currently a Verizon customer.

Quote from my friend:

This guy, Bill, is a friend of a friend of mine. My friend told me about this 4 days after it happened, and kept me posted with daily blogs, but I didn't want to believe it would end like it did. Bill lives in Philadelphia and his dog, Edna, got out on Halloween night, following some children, then got lost. He placed numerous ads, posted 1,000 posters around Philly in hopes that someone would find her. Someone did, unfortunately. He contacted Stu Bykofsky, a columnist, and the story was published today. I'm just so heartsick about this. Fucking Verizon! I hope they find these asshole kids and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.

The story from the media:

 

Verizon disconnects 2 lives

  by Stu Bykofsky, Philadelphia Daily News

    -------------------------------------------------------

    Phone company's foot-dragging stymies police, owner in search for dog's torturers

    THE LAST TIME Bill Whiting heard his little brown dog, she was screaming in pain as two miserable bastards tortured her.

    Whiting heard this over the phone as the two monsters demanded money to return the Beagle mix.

    Her name was Edna, and she was so gentle that Whiting took her to hospitals, where patients cheered up as they petted her. Edna had pointed bunny ears, warm brown eyes and was Whiting's "constant companion" since he adopted her a decade ago. She had never known anything but kindness from human hands.

    Whiting made sure that Edna always wore her collar. Attached to her collar were her vaccination tags, showing she was a healthy dog, and her name tag with Whiting's information, showing she was a loved dog. When Edna walked, her tags jingled.

    Whiting heard the jingling over his Verizon phone as Edna screamed in pain. Terrorized, he couldn't imagine what the savages were doing to his little brown dog.

    He just wanted it to stop - and when he wanted help from Verizon, it came very slowly and at a steep price.

    Edna disappeared on Halloween night. A Center City resident, Whiting was visiting a friend in the Italian Market area, and he brought Edna along, because Edna went everywhere with him.

    That evening, with the doorbell being rung every few minutes by trick-or-treaters, Edna somehow slipped out, maybe to follow some children, because she was a friendly and trusting dog.

    When Whiting noticed she was missing, he frantically ran up and down the narrow South Philly streets, whistling and calling her name. The next morning he put up fliers with her picture, his cell-phone number and the promise of a $500 reward for her return. Whiting hoped anyone finding her would call, either out of the goodness of his heart or desire for the reward.

    He waited vainly for 10 days, heart-sick and physically sick over Edna. Then, late at night on Nov. 10, the phone rang and he could hardly believe what he heard.

    He heard two voices that sounded male and young. The first said he was 16, his brother was 9 and they had his dog. He wanted Whiting, 57, who works for the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, to talk with his brother.

    At first, Whiting says he could barely understand the younger boy, speaking in what he described as "American ghetto slang." Whiting slowly realized the boy wanted $600 to ransom Edna.

    "I was to bring cash, by myself," at midnight to a location Whiting could not decipher.

    Whiting agreed to pay the money but not to a midnight meeting. "They said they wanted the money now, and told me they'd kill the dog, repeating, 'You don't believe me, Mister, let me hurt it so you can hear.' "

    Whiting heard Edna yelp in pain. When he heard the jingling of her tags, Whiting knew they had his beloved little brown dog.

    "I couldn't believe how evil he was," says Whiting. "He said, 'You know, Mister, I want to kill your dog.' "

    Whiting pleaded with them not to hurt Edna, offering to give them even more than $600 if they would keep Edna safe until the morning.

    The line went dead.

    Whiting immediately called 911 and Philadelphia police took the complaint seriously, entering it as extortion.

    A few hours later, at 3 a.m., Whiting got a second call from one of the monsters. "I've killed your dog, it's dead," he said. The call came in on Whiting's land line, which was listed on Edna's name tag but not on the fliers he had posted everywhere.

    Later that morning, Whiting tried to find the phone number the extortionists had used. He called his service provider,Verizon, to tell them to release his phone records to police, but it wasn't that simple.

    "I made about five calls and kept getting people who were good at passing the hot potato," Whiting says. He was told police know the procedure.

    The detective working the case, who asked me not to use his name, says he got a search warrant and faxed it to Verizon on Nov. 16, but it took 12 days before he got a list of calls made to Whiting. The city was charged $150 for the search.

    Verizon charged police $150?

    In most cases, says Verizon spokesman Lee Gierczynski, "the company charges no fee or a nominal one," but in a "very small percentage of cases, Verizon will charge reimbursement fees for gathering information it does not routinely maintain."

    The fee covers some of Verizon"s costs and it makes no profit, he says. In a wired world, I find both the slow service and the high cost hard to swallow.

    A crime has been committed. Another police source tells me the service is no better for other crimes, such as kidnapping, when time is crucial.

    In Edna's case, the detective says, he must now get another search warrant to connect the phone numbers he has to subscribers. He couldn't say what the charge would be or how long it would take..

    More delay and more expense.

    Bill Whiting believes Edna was heartlessly killed by the savages who called him. (You see her picture. If you recall seeing someone with the dog, call police detectives at 215-686-3093 or -3094.)

    Whiting will live for a long time, maybe forever, with the pain of hearing his little brown dog tortured. But he doesn't want Edna to have died in vain. As her legacy, he wants the phone companies to act faster and cheaper. He thinks telecommunications companies should provide free assistance to police "as a public service. It's not like they have a narrow profit margin."

    He's right. Who'll get the ball rolling?

Another storyhere.

Contact Lee Grasinsky, media relations at Verizon, at 412-633-5574 to express your outrage.

[amy]

Another reason for me to hate New York Telephone NYNEX Bell Atlantic Verizon.

[BellisimaJ.]

[quote author=amy link=topic=17028.msg66800#msg66800 date=1196442916]
Another reason for me to hate New York Telephone NYNEX Bell Atlantic Verizon.
[/quote]

Verizon was my cell provider years ago. I never liked their customer service, and eventually moved my account to another company when my contract expired.

IMO, I think that this is something that should be dealt with by Congress, as in passing a bill requiring tele-communications companies to provide services to police (investigations) free of charge, and in a timely manner. God knows, these big companies with the huge profit margins  can afford it..

[BellisimaJ.]

Bill Whiting posted his comments to the philly.com board.

    I recently lost my dog, Edna under circumstances I feel no need to further re-tell. Anyone reading this has already heard the story. I've been through something that has left me unable to recognize the world in which I live. To a large degree, I have my own, (once), incurable optimism to blame. I was the one who put my name and number on over fifteen hundred cedar telephone poles, with the hope of reclaiming my beloved dog, Edna. Yes, much of Philadelphia still has wooden telephone poles. The world around me responded to my cries in a spectrum of ways ranging from the despicable and unexplained to an inspiring generosity of spirit.

    I now face the task of organizing it all in an effort to figure out how I'm going to live with some of it, what I need to live without, and more importantly, what I need to bring forward into the future

    The first thing I had to do came as second nature: I find myself unable to hate the children who wronged me and presumably harmed my dog. Actually who's dog was harmed is almost immaterial. I can't hate those little boys anymore than I could hate a feral cat, (with full apologies to feral cats everywhere). That's all these kids have any hope of ever being, and that touches me with pity, and sadness. Those boys have no chance of ever becoming men. As a man doesn't harm what's weak and defenseless. That's the behavior of a lower life pack animal.

    But I find myself very curious about them. I want to look into my young villains eyes, if only to see if there's any glimmer of light behind those eyes. I imagine my cowards to be children born of children, inheriting nothing more than hopelessness and a third or forth generation drug addiction perhaps even laced with a latent dose of HIV - a potent mix for any human animal to overcome. American cities are ripe with children like this.

    Chances are one or both parents are missing, fostering within them a hopelessly fractured comprehension of what defines decency. After all, who has been there to guide them? What visited me by phone in the wee hours of the morning of November 11th, was nothing more than the venom of dangerous strays. Objects of pity, practicing to get worse, looking forward to a less than fifty/fifty chance of ever reaching adulthood.

    You can't hate creatures like that, its pointless. But what do we expect when six percent of this nation controls ninety percent of the wealth. With 'no child left behind', I can easily point out two who represent scores of tens of thousands who's only hope of leaving a mark on this world is to deface it or take violently from it. They're remarkably similar to the six percent who control all the wealth, sharing the common objectives of ruthlessness and greed.

    Everyone failed Edna including me. I looked the other way believing she's stay by my side, but I should never have let her out of my sight. I believe she was lured, unseen into the mêlée of Halloween revelers by way of her own understanding of world filled only with love and trust, not realizing how quickly it could swallow her up.

    My family is largely formed of law enforcement, so I am loathe to blame the police, but I do believe I was let down by them - and how could I not be? During my odyssey to find my dog, I passed a make-shift memorial lined with stuffed animals, plastic flowers, and a poster-board note in memory of a child cut down too young. In the same breath, a respected veteran policeman was laid to rest, killed pointlessly in the line of duty, leaving a grieving family behind. In a blink of an eye, more feral children set a homeless man on fire. The only thing the crime which haunts me has in common with any other crimes in this city, is that they all happened in Philadelphia. We're ripe with it, Philadelphia is under siege...

    ...And who knows what mischief goes on behind the tinted blue glass towers filled with the soulless power-brokers who really control more of our daily lives than we realize, by keeping the majority of people anesthetized with trash TV and shopping malls.

    A lost dog, is merely a lost dog, except to the one who loves that dog.

    Edna has left an indelible mark on my heart, and would have done so, even if she'd been afforded the luxury of living out her life, and dying of natural causes. Edna was a kick-#### little dog full of life and courage, that spread to my own definition of myself. She was a force, and people who knew her loved her. I was by far, not the only one. Everywhere that little dog led me, has taken me toward something good. A new friend, an adventure, or something that enriched my life. Perhaps even now during this strange chain of events... Something good may still come of this. I need to believe that.
    - Bill Whiting

[sneakymagenta]

Sigh.

[BellisimaJ.]

An update from The Philadelphia Daily News:

PHILADELPHIA POLICE have charged a suspect in the horrifying case of Edna, the little brown dog held for ransom in a telephoned extortion attempt last fall.

The accused, a 15-year-old Nicetown boy, was arrested and taken into custody in the early morning of Dec. 30. Because he is a juvenile, his name is being withheld by police.

He faces felony charges of extortion, criminal conspiracy and criminal mischief, in addition to charges of harassment and terroristic threats.




Edna was the "constant companion" of Center City resident Bill Whiting. She disappeared Halloween night from the home of a friend Whiting was visiting in the Italian Market area.

He suspects Edna, a beagle mix with warm brown eyes that he had adopted from a shelter a decade ago, might have slipped out when the door was repeatedly opened for trick-or-treaters. Whiting, 57, thinks Edna might have followed some children because she was a friendly and trusting dog.

As soon as Whiting realized Edna was missing, he frantically ran up and down the surrounding South Philly streets, whistling and calling her name. The next morning he put up 1,500 fliers with her pictures, his cell-phone number and the promise of a $500 reward for her return. He then waited, heart-sick and physically ill with worry over his pet.

His wait ended late on Nov. 10, with a phone call at 11:58 p.m. that chilled his blood.

He heard two hard-to-understand voices that sounded male and young. The first said he was 16, his brother was 9 and they had Edna. They demanded $600 to return his dog.

"I was to bring cash, by myself," at midnight to a location Whiting could not decipher, he said.

Whiting, who does not drive, agreed to the payment, but not to a midnight meeting. "They said they wanted the money now, and told me they'd kill the dog, repeating, 'You don't believe me, Mister - let me hurt it so you can hear.' "

His heart jumped when he heard a pained yelp over the phone. When he heard the jingling of her tags, Whiting knew they had his beloved little brown dog.

"I couldn't believe how evil he was," says Whiting. "He said, 'You know, Mister, I want to kill your dog.' "

Whiting begged them not to hurt Edna and offered to give them more than $600 if they would keep her safe until the morning.

The line went dead.

Around 3 a.m., Whiting got a second call from the extortionists. They said they had killed Edna.




Whiting called 911 after the 11:58 p.m. phone call and police began to investigate the extortion attempt.

The investigation was slowed by police bureaucratic procedures and by delays in getting Whiting's phone records from Verizon. Each request required a search warrant and each search warrant took several days.

After weeks of searching, Detective Charles Williams was able to connect the 11:58 p.m. call received by Whiting with a landline in the suspect's Nicetown home. He is the only juvenile in the home, Williams told me.

The youth denied knowledge of the crime, but during an interview skillfully guided by Williams, he used the first name and the nickname of two of his friends. Williams then scoured area schools and tracked down the suspect's two friends.

"It took a lot of time and legwork," Williams said.

The two were interviewed in their parents' presence and both signed statements, Williams said, that the suspect had told them he made the extortion phone call. The suspect bragged about the incident, they said, although they didn't know if he actually had Edna. Each has agreed to testify.

Reached yesterday, Whiting said: "I just want to make sure he is the right person. I don't want anyone rushing to judgment. I believe in due process. I feel somewhat relieved, but I don't think he is the only person involved in this. I spoke to two different people."

The suspect was processed at the Youth Study Center and released into his mother's custody under "intense supervision" of a probation officer, according to the D.A.'s office. He'll be assigned a trial date on Jan. 31.

When he's tried, I'll be there.

By Stu_Bykofsky

[jezebel]

He faces felony charges of extortion, criminal conspiracy and criminal mischief, in addition to charges of harassment and terroristic threats.

The punishment should be an eye for an eye.