Exhausted Police Officer Helps Abandoned Puppy Find New Home and Gets Honored for His Service

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When we are deprived of sleep, all we want to do is hit the hay as soon as possible, but not for one police officer in Florida. He took an abandoned puppy that he found to the vet for a medical check after his 12-hour shift was over.

In May 2016, Officer Kareem Garibaldi from Florida’s Lakeland Police Department almost hit a small pit bull-boxer-mix puppy because “the pup was running around loose in the neighborhood,” wrote the Lakeland Police Department on their Facebook page.

As the pup, later named Hope, didn’t have any collar or dog tag, Garibaldi took it home after his shift. But when he couldn’t find Hope’s owner, he decided to take her to the SPCA for a health checkup.

It was Garibaldi’s third 12-hour shift when he took Hope to the center. Though he was tired, Hope was his priority, and he waited at the shelter for three hours for the vet to check on the pup.

When the shelter’s safety net manager, Connie Johnson, came out, she was surprised by what she saw—Garibaldi asleep on the bench with Hope beside him.

“I walked in, and that’s when I saw him and the puppy,” Johnson told The Dodo. “He was exhausted, the puppy was exhausted, and they were sleeping. It was one of those moments that just grab your heart. He was so determined to get her help.

“It clearly was a selfless thing to do. He wasn’t thinking about getting home to sleep. He was thinking about what he could do to help this puppy survive. He actually woke up at one point just to see if she was OK, then he went back to sleep.”

After the medical check, Garibaldi took Hope back to the police station, where the young puppy was subsequently adopted by the dispatcher.

Due to his act of kindness, Garibaldi was later honored with the Hometown Hero Award.

“With everything that is going on in the world, I just wanted to do one small, little thing, just to try and make it better,” Garibaldi said in a Facebook video uploaded by the police department.

Watch the video below: