A Bronx woman is suing the city, the Animal Care Centers, and an unidentified rescue group for wrongly adopting out her beloved emotional support dog.
Denise McCurrie, 52, has gone nine months without her beloved Roscoe, who was sent to ACC when she was hospitalized during an anxiety attack. The 19-pound, 7-year-old miniature schnauzer was given away after just three days later, she charges.
“I had Roscoe for seven years. He was my buddy, he was my reason for living, my reason for getting up in the morning,” she said. “He was irreplaceable. He’s not like a pair of shoes or something.”
McCurrie, a former Wall Street underwriter who has long suffered from depression, called 911 in April when she believed she might be having heart trouble. She asked emergency workers and NYPD officers who responded to take Roscoe, to make sure he’d be cared for, she told The Post last year.
He ended up at ACC, according to McCurrie, who said she called the organization multiple times to let them know she was the canine’s owner, and that he was being treated for an ear infection.
ACC claimed Roscoe didn’t have identification or a microchip when they received him. Even though state law requires pounds to hold unidentified dogs for up to five days, McCurrie claims ACC quickly sent Roscoe off to one of their rescue group partners.
She has proof of ownership and contends in her Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit that ACC “wrongfully, improperly, and illegally” gave Roscoe to the rescue group.
“They knew the dog had an owner, he wasn’t a stray animal,” she said.
But Roscoe was in “remarkably appalling” shape when the rescue received him, the group claimed, according to shelter notes obtained by The Post via a Freedom of Information Law request.
“This dog was covered in his own feces, constantly leaking copious amounts of pus from his mouth … clearly in tremendous pain, and smelled worse than almost any animal we’ve taken in,” according to the notes, which refer to McCurrie as “the previous owner.”
“Something isn’t quite adding up, perhaps there’s a possibility that the previous owner became somehow unable to provide proper care between his late 2020 vet appointments and now,” the notes continued.
McCurrie, who is suing to get her dog back, said she had been doing everything she could for Roscoe in the weeks and months before her hospitalization, and spent more than $4,000 on his treatment.
“They just did whatever the hell they wanted,” she said of ACC.
“Even giving ACC the benefit of the doubt and assuming there was some misunderstanding in the beginning, they came to learn someone was claiming ownership of the dog, someone who was in the hospital, and at that point, everything should have stopped,” said attorney Nora Constance Marino, who along with lawyer Joe Murray represents McCurrie.
An ACC spokeswoman declined comment.