The cops were hunting gangsters — but instead, they found Hazel, a frightened, battered pit bull.
Now Hazel has a new home, far from the East Harlem’s Wagner Houses, where last summer, they stumbled on shocking footage of a man repeatedly kicking the cowering pooch in an elevator.
Thanks to a crew of some of the city’s toughest cops and prosecutors — plus the kind care of vets and ASPCA officials — the sweet pooch has found a happy ending: an adoptive home with a loving couple in Astoria, Queens.
“We didn’t know her story,” new owner Richard Palacios, a 33-year-old SoHo waiter, said after the adoption Friday.
“When we saw the video, my fiancée started crying.”
“It was an extensive investigation,” Jon Veiga, deputy chief of the Manhattan DA’s violent-criminal-enterprise unit, recalled of the unusual man- and dog-hunt last week.
“Our concern at first was that the dog was being beaten to be used as a bait dog, in pit-bull fighting,” Veiga said. “She looked submissive,” on the surveillance tape, leading investigators to wonder “if we had stumbled onto a dog-fighting ring.”
Within two weeks, Hazel and her abusive owner, Brian Freeman, 28, of The Bronx, were found, and separated forever.
Investigators’ suspicions proved unfounded. Despite her cracked rib and bruises, she had no prior injuries.
And Freeman had no record nor involvement in gangs. He was also employed, working security at a Manhattan homeless shelter and studying public administration at Hofstra.
“For the people I see, that’s almost unheard of,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin, who almost exclusively handles gang cases, told The Post.
Last week, the judge promised to give Freeman a term of 25 days’ community service at sentencing on Feb. 5.
Freeman is extremely remorseful, Veiga noted during Freeman’s guilty plea to misdemeanor trespassing. Shown the video of his cruelty, “He couldn’t even bring himself to believe he’d done such a thing,” the prosecutor told the judge.
“How’s the dog? The dog’s not broke or anything is it?” Freeman had asked NYPD detectives when he was busted two weeks after the incident.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Freeman told The Post afterward.
His Legal Aid lawyer, Sam Roberts, said, “It was a one-time incident, and he has expressed remorse.”
And now, “Hazel is OK,” said new co-owner Natalya Prokenpenko, 24.
“As soon as we got her home, she started kissing me, kissing my fiancé,”
by LAURA ITALIANO
Thank God she is away from that horrible man. If he does it once, he will do it again, and has probably done it before. If you kick a dog hard enough to break its ribs, you have had some practice. It is eerie he works at a homeless shelter. I will never understand abuse of anmals.
Im so very happy that dog found a good forever home i can tell if that woman started crying when she saw the dog being kicked & hurt in a video she certainly will be a good pet parent