Stolen Buckhead dog reunited with owner 5 years after car theft

The thief struck in broad daylight, on a Friday afternoon five years ago, taking a silver Range Rover from the Whole Foods parking lot in Buckhead. Jared Mula had left the motor running. His puppy, a goldendoodle named Juju, was in the front seat. Mula was in the store less than 10 minutes. When he came back, the vehicle and the dog were gone.

Mula was a 51-year-old insurance agent, single with no children. Juju was his first dog, acquired just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic began. They ran together at Chastain Park. Juju slept by his owner’s side. Now, in the parking lot, Mula was so horrified about losing Juju that he couldn’t even unlock his phone to call the police. His hands were shaking. He kept putting in the wrong code.

Mula finally borrowed someone else’s phone and called the authorities. He could not have known what lay ahead.

How thousands of strangers would join the effort to find Juju.

How the reckless pursuit of a missing dog would put his own life in danger.

And how, after a mysterious absence that stretched on for years, Juju would finally come home.

Credit: Jared Mula/Courtesy

Credit: Jared Mula/Courtesy

The vehicle turns up, but the dog is gone

There was something different about 2020. The isolation changed people. Some behaved worse than usual. And others took on a heavier burden of care, a heightened interest in the welfare of humanity. When Jared Mula first posted on Facebook about his missing dog, a lot of these other people responded.

I don’t care about the car, Mula wrote. I just want my dog back. Please share post with your friends and help me get Juju back home.

It probably helped that the post offered a cash reward. It was shared a thousand times. And then 10,000. And finally more than 100,000. Mula said the sharers included a famous actor from a popular Netflix drama. Mula was inundated with friend requests. He’d included his phone number in the post, and he started getting hundreds of calls a day. Some came from other states, and even other countries. Mula got unsolicited text messages from pet psychics. It was kind. It was touching. And sometimes it was all a little too much.

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What Mula needed was hard evidence. That was scarce. Two days after the Range Rover was stolen, he woke up to a message from the police. The SUV had been found, abandoned, in southeast Atlanta. Juju was not inside.

Mula went door-to-door at apartment complexes near where the vehicle was found. He and his friends put up flyers with Juju’s picture. A tip came in: Juju had been seen in a field near I-20. Borrowing an employee’s dog, Mula searched the field. The dog stepped on something. Possibly a hive of ground-nesting bees. Mula and the dog were stung many times.

One day someone called to say Juju might be with a homeless person under a bridge near Georgia Tech. Mula drove to check it out. He got out of the car and walked around under the bridge. Someone was yelling. He didn’t see a dog. In desperation, Mula opened a tent flap, hoping to get information from whoever was inside. Instead, he said, the occupant pulled a gun.

Mula put up his hands and apologized. He left a flyer outside the tent.

A private eye takes the case and gets an unpleasant surprise

Craig Brazeman is a private investigator who once rescued an abandoned dog named Buster while he was working a case. Brazeman is not a pet detective — certainly not full-time, anyway — but he’s become the guy some people call when pets disappear. Especially when they’re stolen. Brazeman doesn’t charge for the pet cases. He once helped recover two French bulldogs who’d been snatched away from a veterinary clinic.

“Whether anybody wants to admit it or not,” he said recently, in the basement of his home in Buckhead, where a desk with four computer monitors sat near a Mortal Kombat arcade machine, “there is an underground market for stolen dogs.”

Credit: Courtesy Photo

Neither Mula nor Brazeman thought Juju had been stolen intentionally. Juju appeared to be an accidental casualty of an auto theft. And so Brazeman began looking into an auto-theft ring.

Thieves were hard at work in Buckhead during the pandemic. Range Rovers kept disappearing. The actor Tyrese Gibson had his Range Rover taken from his driveway. The rapper Akon was pumping gas at a QuikTrip when someone got in the driver’s seat and drove away.

Credit: POUYA DIANAT / pdianat@ajc.com

Brazeman got to work. He examined the surveillance video from Whole Foods and from outside the store where Mula’s Range Rover was found. He started talking to people. And he was pretty sure he’d identified some suspects. But when he interviewed relatives of these suspects, it seemed that none of them had ever seen Juju. That led Brazeman to believe that no one connected with the thieves was keeping Juju as a pet.

Still, the tips kept coming in. People shared pictures of Juju that had obviously been altered. Callers had specific information about Juju’s collar and harness. Some were obviously running scams to try to get the reward money. None of the tips led anywhere.

One day Brazeman was in East Point, chasing another lead on Juju. It must be said: A lot of people from Buckhead have Range Rovers. Brazeman was filling his Range Rover’s tank at a gas station when he saw the brake lights go on. The bad guys had done the same thing to Akon. Someone got in the driver’s seat and drove the Range Rover away.

Unwilling to concede the loss, Brazeman gave chase on foot. He nearly caught up with the thief at an intersection. But the thief hit the gas, he said, and plowed into a tree. Then the thief got out and escaped.

“Basically,” Brazeman said, “the front end of my Range Rover exploded.”

Time passed. The trail went cold. A breeder in Alabama told Mula he could have the pick of a litter. And that’s how, in 2021, he got a new goldendoodle puppy named Juice.

“He became the love of my life, you know?” Mula said.

Around 2023, one of Mula’s employees FaceTimed him from Tampa to show him another adorable dog. A cross between a toy poodle and a Maltese, also known as a Maltipoo. Mula couldn’t say no. That’s how he got Herbie, his second replacement dog.

One afternoon about four months ago, Mula was pulling into the office parking lot when he got a phone call from Petkey. The company keeps a database of microchips that have been implanted into pets to track their location. Petkey had an important message for Mula. He needed to go to the Petsmart on Howell Mill Road.

Mula ran upstairs to tell his employees the news.

“I found Juju,” he said.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

How Juju finally came home

The particulars of Juju’s life from August 2020 to March 2025 remain unknown to Mula. Where did he go after the Range Rover was stolen? Did someone else keep him as a pet? If so, why was he found wandering downtown Atlanta almost five years after he disappeared?

All those mysteries aside, Aniyah Anderson has a few answers. Whatever else may be true, she is the reason Juju came home.

Anderson, 25, lives in an apartment north of the Georgia Aquarium. In a phone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Anderson said she saw what she thought was a stray dog in the parking lot. It was March 17, 2025. She opened the car door. The dog got in. She called out to ask if anyone owned the dog. No one said they did.

Anderson had never owned a pet before. She liked this dog. He was so friendly and well-behaved. She took him to get a bath. She bought a dog bed and some dog food. She gave him a name: Zen.

“I felt like he chose me,” she said.

Anderson believed she had found a new pet. There was just one more thing to do. She took the dog to Petsmart on Howell Mill Road, where he was checked for a microchip.

Yes, he had one.

We’ll have to call the owners, someone told her.

There, outside the store, she met Mula. He told her the backstory and thanked her for finding Juju.

“At the time,” she said, “I didn’t even really feel happy about it.”

But eventually she felt better. Mula gave her a cash reward. Anderson went on Craiglist and found another dog, an Aussiedoodle puppy she named Zeina. It all pretty much worked out.

Credit: Courtesy Aniyah Anderson

As for Juju, he’d been gone so long that Mula wasn’t sure Juju remembered him. But when he took the dog home, to the seventh-floor loft in Buckhead, Juju smelled the old smells and seemed to light up.

They were all together on a recent afternoon, Mula and Juju and Juice and Herbie. Mula never intended to have three dogs, but life is full of surprises, some bad, and some good. The three dogs got along fine. Juju was on the couch, noisily chewing on a bone. Mula threw a toy, and Juju fetched.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Wherever he’d been all that time, someone had apparently taken decent care of him. He had no heartworms, no fleas. He’d had plenty to eat, too, and was slightly overweight.

“That’s the only thing about all this,” Mula said. “I just wanna know.”

He will probably never know the details of Juju’s odyssey. And in one way, it doesn’t matter. These are the most important things: Juju was lost. Juju was found. And now Juju is home to stay.

“He won’t leave my side,” Mula said.

“I don’t even need a leash.”

Jared Mula’s dog Juju vanished in 2020 when Mula’s vehicle was stolen. Five years later, they had a loving reunion. (Miguel Martinez/AJC)