COMMENTARY
Bruce Andriatch: Late night noise for a lost dog
Joyce Gramza sounds like a woman who has lost her best friend. She has, but that’s only part of the reason her tone veers from on the brink of tears to barely hidden anger a half-dozen times in 30 minutes.
Gramza is grieving the death last month of her beloved dog. Honey, a 13-year-old Shar-Pei/German shepherd mix Gramza had since she was a puppy, was apparently hit by a car after wandering away from an unfamiliar house in Snyder. That’s why Gramza is sad.
Even worse, she can’t shake the feeling that her dog might still be alive if she hadn’t been prevented from loudly calling the pet’s name by an Amherst police officer enforcing the noise ordinance.
Gramza was visiting family over the holidays. On Sunday, Dec. 28, she was packing the car to return to the Syracuse area when she noticed her pet was missing. So she did what any dog lover would do: started calling the animal’s name.
Gramza doesn’t know what time she started searching and screaming, but she concedes that it was late at night, probably near midnight.
Shortly after the search began, an Amherst police car rolled up.
“I actually thought when they first came, they were going to help me,” she said of the police. “But, no, they were telling me I had to be quiet. They said they had complaints, plural. Probably not. Probably there was one complaint. The officer was nice, but he said he could arrest me if I didn’t quiet down.”
“I said, ‘Nice dog lovers in this neighborhood.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, but if you cause another complaint, I’m going to arrest you. You can keep looking for her, but you have to do it quietly.’ ”
So Gramza stopped yelling, “HONEY!” and started quietly saying, “Honey.” But there was no response.
Two days later, after Gramza had taken out a lost-dog ad in The Buffalo News, a woman called saying she had seen a dog matching Honey’s description dead on the side of I-290. Gramza was able to confirm that it was her dog.
Because she had filed a lost-dog report with the Amherst police, she called to let a dispatcher know that her dog had been killed. She said she told the woman who answered the phone: “You guys prevented me from looking for her the night she got out, when I had the best chance of finding her.”
Assistant Police Chief Tim Green said he was not familiar with this incident. But after being told the details, he said that it would be unfair to blame the department in general or one officer in particular for the dog’s death.
“Their dog got away, and because the police had an issue about the noise that they were making to get the dog, the whole situation is now the Amherst Police Department’s fault?” he said.
The town’s noise ordinance is a “quality-of-life” statute. Green said that most of the violations involve loud parties, not lost dogs. Green, a dog lover himself, said that if his dog got lost late at night and he was yelling the animal’s name and the police told him to knock it off, he isn’t sure how he would respond.
Gramza did what she was told. She’s left grieving for her dog, angry at the person or people who called the police because she was looking for her, and stunned that she was flirting with arrest if she continued.
Would continuing to call the dog’s name have made a difference? Of course, no one can say. Gramza said she purposely has not learned more details about when and where the dog was hit.
“I don’t want to know exactly how far away I was from possibly being able to save her,” she said. “That would just torture me.”
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