Petey, a rare lizard stolen from a Lexington pet store was recovered safely on Mar. 22.
Petey is a monkey-tailed skink, a near-threatened species of reptile native to Madagascar. Petey is one of the few captive bred skinks in the United States.
“You don’t see them a whole lot because you can’t take them out of the wild,” Hannah Huffman, manager of Most Valuable Pets in Lexington, told the Lexington Herald-Leader. “They have to be captive-bred, so he’s one of the very few captive-bred ones in the United States.”
The theft, which took place around 6:30 pm on Mar. 19, was captured by the store’s security cameras. Two individuals, a man and a woman, entered the store and went directly to Petey’s enclosure. The two appear to take Petey out of his tank, and the woman attempts to hide the lizard under a jacket before placing him inside her purse. The two suspects then walked around the store for a few minutes, then left.
Although monkey-tailed skinks are sold at Most Valuable Pets, Petey himself is not for sale, though there was a price-tag for monkey-tailed skinks posted near his tank. Authorities suspect the price-tag may have served as motivation for the theft.
Nathan Mullikan, assistant director of Scott County Animal Care and Control, told the Herald-Leader that the two suspects attempted to drop the lizard off at the Scott County animal control building on Tuesday morning. Officers at the facility noticed the female suspect get out of the duo’s vehicle with a terrarium, which she placed at the facility’s doorstep. Then she knocked on the door and ran back to the vehicle.
A few of the officers attempted to stop the suspects because it’s illegal to abandon an animal without paperwork. Others inspected the terrarium, finding that it contained a monkey-tailed skink and a note which read, “please return to the pet store in Lexington.” The officers determined that the lizard was Petey.
“We kind of put two and two together and several officers went behind the vehicle to get their license plate and they were able to talk them into staying until the sheriff’s department could get here,” Mullikan said.
The suspects were cooperative, and were apprehended by local authorities. Both were cited by the Lexington police for shoplifting $500 to $1,000, while the male suspect was arrested for an unrelated shoplifting warrant.