Gerard Chasteen, 26, allegedly shot three bullets at the drone.
A Long Island, New York, man has been arrested for shooting down a drone that was deployed to look for a missing dog last week.
In a flash, Ashley Lang’s beloved mixed-breed dog Dezi ran out of her back yard, down the block and was gone. “I reached out the door to get a bottle of water and she got right past me, out the door,” Lang told Inside Edition. “I was devastated.”
Volunteers mobilized all over the Long Island town of St. James. “We were trying to lure her to various traps we set in the area,” said volunteer Charmaine DeRosa.
A photo shows Dezi being lured by a tray of food, but the clever dog kept her hind legs outside the trap door, avoiding the trigger and running off again.
That's when volunteer Teddy Henn took to the air with his drone, hoping to catch sight of Dezi. The drone scoured the neighborhood and remote woods looking for the dog.
“As I’m flying the drone, the alarms start going off, things started going haywire,” he said. “I thought a bird hit it.”
The drone crashed to the ground and Henn went searching for it. He found it on the ground and he was startled to see that it had been blown out of the sky.
“In a million years, I never thought my drone would be shot with a gun,” he said.
Gerard Chasteen, 26, allegedly shot three bullets at the drone. Police arrested him Sunday on criminal mischief and weapons charges.
“The guy came out irate, screaming, you can't fly a drone over my house, I shot it down,” Henn claimed.
Dezi is now back home — after three days missing, she returned all on her own.
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