The 32-year-old joined other onlookers in trying to rescue Mabel as she zig-zagged throughout the streets of Lakewood and East Dallas. As someone who runs 10 miles a day, four days a week, Chamberlain is fast — but so is Mabel.
The high-speed chase lasted 45 minutes to an hour, Chamberlain said, but the tale was far from over. What started as a feel-good story about a community coming together to save a loose dog culminated in Chamberlain getting pegged as a thief by internet sleuths and an “aggressive” confrontation.
“It's not every day that this happens,” Chamberlain quipped during a call with the Observer.
The way Chamberlain tells it, he and several others finally cornered Mabel in an alley between Swiss and Gaston avenues. She ran back and forth to evade capture until eventually running out of steam. Mabel didn’t have tags, Chamberlain said, so he took her home to give her food and water. A friend later told him that if Mabel had a microchip, a veterinarian could retrieve her owner’s information. He planned to take her on Monday.
But unbeknownst to Chamberlain, who is Black, someone had posted to social media a photo of him carrying Mabel, writing that “it look[ed] suspicious.” The picture showed Chamberlain with dirt stains on his gray hoodie, holding a wide-eyed, panting Mabel.
Mabel’s owner, Andrew Sibley, saw the picture, which he shared on social media. “This is a photo of my dog being stolen,” he wrote in part.
Sibley would go on to tell the local CBS affiliate that he believed his dog had been swiped from his apartment’s side yard. His social media pleas about Mabel received hundreds of responses from folks as far as Australia. One person commented on Reddit: “Because French Bulldogs are quite popular now and known to be expensive, this guy most likely stole her to sell her.” Another wrote: “This dude’s kneecaps need a good break in.”
Sibley would later update his followers that he’d tracked down Mabel on Sunday, April 2, thanks to “intell [sic] gathered from many of you.” As he pulled up to the place where he thought Chamberlain would be, he said he saw him planting a kiss on Mabel’s nose. Sibley brought out his knife in an attempt to free Mabel from a makeshift leash. He also took “a 20inch [sic] piece of some thickly scheduled pipe, and brandished the weapon,” he wrote.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 14, though, Sibley walked back this claim, telling the Observer that his social media post wasn’t “100% factual” and that he’d never raised the pipe in a threatening manner. He also said Chamberlain didn’t steal Mabel and that she’d gotten out of the gate. For his part, Chamberlain said that Sibley “was really aggressive. He had a baton and a knife and was accusing me of stealing the dog.”
Mabel’s owner insists that he wasn’t trying to hurt anyone but was just desperate to find his pup. He said he went off the information he had available to him at the time but now feels like he’s being “vilified.”
Sibley’s girlfriend wrote on social media earlier this month that they would be “reaching out to make amends with Lamar,” according to the Lakewood Advocate. As of early Friday afternoon, Chamberlain said he still hadn’t heard from them.
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Ferrer saw Mabel tear past a corner with Chamberlain in pursuit, followed by several other people on foot and more trailing behind in a car. “It was literally like Scooby Doo. It was hilarious,” Ferrer recalled. “And [Mabel] is having a blast: This dog looks like she is having such a good time. It's her taste of freedom.”
She also corroborated Chamberlain’s account of chasing down Mabel in an alley.
“They tried to make it seem like I was a thief, but all along, I was just wanting to help this dog get out of the street and be safe.” – Lamar Chamberlain
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Ferrer figured that was the end of the story — until she learned of the “wanted” picture circulating online. Mob mentality had taken hold, she said, so she began leaving comments to defend Chamberlain as Mabel’s rescuer.
It’s easy to get swept up in a dramatic story, Ferrer continued, but she hopes that moving forward, people will take a beat to assess the facts before putting someone on blast. She’d like to see this as a “study of implicit bias” and warns against making assumptions based on someone's appearance. She noted that certain online allegations about Chamberlain, such as that he stays in a sober living house, turned out not to be true.
“I'm not trying to accuse anyone of having any sort of particular discrimination, because that's a big thing to accuse someone else of,” Ferrer said. “But I wonder if this would have happened if it had been someone else carrying Mabel down the street.”
Kristi Shanahan played a crucial role in changing the narrative around Mabel’s great escape. After seeing social media users accuse Chamberlain of dog-snatching — and eyewitnesses like Ferrer coming to his defense — she began fiercely advocating for a man she’d never met, posting about it in the Reform Dallas group on Facebook.
The internet had effectively deemed Chamberlain guilty, and Shanahan feared what that could mean for him as he went about his daily life. Would passersby in the grocery store treat him like a dog thief?
Shanahan was worried about how quickly things were escalating on social media. Seeing people accuse Chamberlain of looking “suspicious” reminded her of the 2020 case of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man murdered in a racially motivated hate crime in Georgia.
“[Arbery] was going for a jog, and he decided to poke around at a construction site and somebody said, ‘Hey, that looks suspicious.’ That is how things get out of hand,” Shanahan told the Observer. “And so, the last thing that I wanted was for this to turn into something that was even more explosive, because there was no proof that he was guilty.”
Shanahan and Ferrer each said they'd contacted local news outlets to try and correct the “dog-thief” storyline.
Mabel’s owners had promised a reward for returning her, “no questions asked.” But when it looked like no such reward would come for Chamberlain, Shanahan created a GoFundMe campaign with the title: “Lamar is actually the Hero!”
As of Friday afternoon, it had raised more than $5,700.
The Observer asked Sibley if he’d considered extending the reward to Chamberlain. He replied that he had considered it, and that he’d dropped off a letter of apology at the site where he recovered Mabel.
Later, he added: “Whatever happened between Friday evening and Sunday [afternoon] with our dog is a complete mystery to everyone. At least, we certainly don't know. And if Lamar is 100% in the right and he, unbeknownst to us, made every [effort] to try to get in contact with us, then it's really good that he's getting a lot more money than we could ever possibly afford to get him. We couldn't afford to give him $5,000.”
Despite being wrongly cast as a dognapper, Chamberlain is viewing all this as a learning experience. He’s appreciative of the support he’s received from strangers and said he fell in love with Mabel during his brief time with her. “They tried to make it seem like I was a thief, but all along, I was just wanting to help this dog get out of the street and be safe,” he said. “I’m glad it happened, and I'm glad she’s back to her owners.”
The way Chamberlain sees it, it was a privilege for him to help out. And rather than shying away from extending a hand to his neighbors, he said he’s even more motivated to give back to his community.
“[People] don't have to stand there or wait on first responders,” Chamberlain said. “They can get involved and actually be a participant in even saving a life, or just helping somebody to get aid and get help when it's needed. And that's what I did.”
