Instead of getting answers, she said she was blocked.ĭesperate to find Holly and Jingle, Harding and Natalia Kozikowska-Trapani, another NYCARG member, went to Haq's Woodhaven home, knocking on her door and hanging flyers in the neighborhood. Unable to get into contact with Haq, she turned to Instagram for the first time in June of 2021 and made a public post about Holly and Jingle in an attempt to get a response. They needed to get their follow-up shots if they were going to be outside,' Harding said. Where were Holly and Jingle? Were they even still alive? Eventually, Harding heard a disturbing rumor through the cat community grapevine: that Haq had released Holly and Jingle outdoors in Woodhaven, where she lives-far from the shed in Harlem where they were originally found. Please get back ASAP.' By 2021, all of Harding's messages were met with silence from Haq. I haven't seen any pictures or updates and I need to get them. 'I don't want to have to get other people involved, but I will if I have to. 'Hi Farhana, I haven't heard from you in a while and I've been reaching out,' she wrote again, more than a year later. 'I felt bad for her because she was doing her own cat stuff, and she cried poverty and had kids and all that, so I did give her money,' Harding said-$150 a month, before she switched to buying Haq food through the pet supply delivery service Chewy.īuddy was returned to Harding's care a few months later at the beginning of 2019-but for more than a year, the two women were unable to set a time for Harding to pick up Holly and Jingle, which Harding said set off major 'alarm bells.' 'I'm not sure why you're not getting back to me,' Harding texted Haq in March 2019. The first sign that something might be off was when Haq asked for money to take the trio of cats in-something Harding says she'd never done before. She was interviewing me, and I appreciated that,' Harding said. Harding had connected with Haq through Instagram, where Haq had for years run a robust cat rescue account called Crazy Cat Fam.Īt first, everything seemed fine-Haq, said Harding, 'said all the right things.' 'She was very communicative.

After a few conversations, she thought she'd found the perfect person for the job: a woman named Farhana Haq.

All three, whom she named Buddy, Holly, and Jingle, needed a temporary, safe place to sleep and an experienced caregiver, so she put out a call for help on her organization's Instagram page. Toward the end of 2018, Harding, a Harlem resident and founder of the cat rescue nonprofit New York City Animal Rescue Girls, was looking for a home for three young cats that were found in a shed in her neighborhood. In some ways, none of this would have happened-not the springtime morning raid, not the 44 charges of animal neglect-if Holly and Jingle had just been returned to Alicia Harding.

Parasite in city part 2