Brooklyn woman says groomer killed dog by turning collar into noose

A Brooklyn woman claimed a Bay Ridge dog groomer who was previously busted for animal abuse killed her beloved 6-year-old cocker spaniel by carelessly turning the doomed pup’s collar into a noose.

Melissa Lee said she brought her dog, Reba, to Fluff and Love Grooming on Fourth Avenue on Aug. 28, dropping the animal off at 3 p.m. for a quick bath and paw cleaning.

“It should have taken an hour,” said Lee, 65, a retired city public school teacher who lives in the neighborhood. 

But three hours later, she hadn’t heard back from the groomer, so Lee called Fluff and Love, but couldn’t reach owner Bechir Bejaoui. That’s when Lee walked to the shop to pick up her pooch. 

Bejaoui said Reba was placed in a crate 90 minutes earlier, and that he needed more time to work on her, since she’d urinated on herself, Lee recalled. 

“I asked, ‘Where is she?’” Lee said. “He didn’t want me to get her, but I could hear her breathing weird.”

Lee eventually opened the crate, and felt around Reba’s neck, finding a tightly-pulled canvas slip collar.

“I couldn’t get my hand in between her neck and the collar to loosen it,” Lee recalled. “I turned her body to face me, and I thought her eyes were missing. They were rolled back in her head. It looked like she had big red tumors for eyes.”

She grabbed Reba and laid her on the floor as another client was entering the business.

“The woman gasped” when she saw Reba’s eyes, Lee said. “[Bechir] started yelling at me, saying, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’ He was so concerned I was going to blame him.”

Lee, along with her daughter Reeva Grammatikopoulos rushed Reba to Bay Street Animal Hospital on Staten Island.

“When we got there, she was cyanotic and struggling to breathe,” Lee said. “They placed her in an oxygen tank. They administered steroids. They could not remove her from the oxygen tank because every time they tried to, she could not breathe on her own.”

Reba’s heart eventually gave out, her owner said.

“The only comfort I have is that she knew that I came to the store to pick her up, she knew that I was there because she wagged her tail and tried to look at me,” she said. “I lost a child that night.”

Lee, who has staged two protests outside Bejaoui’s business, said she believes Reba was strangled by the collar. 

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals now has Reba’s body, and will perform a necropsy to determine what caused her death. 

The NYPD’s Animal Cruelty Squad is investigating the incident, a police spokesperson said, adding no charges have been filed against Bejaoui.

Bejaoui did not respond to repeated calls seeking comment.

Since Reba’s death, social media pages for Fluff and Love Grooming have been removed.

In 2007, while working as a groomer at Fins, Furs, ‘n’ Feathers, Bejaoui was arrested for animal cruelty stemming from the alleged abuse of a Burmese cat, records show.

A Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office spokesman was unable to provide additional information on the alleged crime, noting the case file was sealed.

In a message posted to customers before Bejaoui disabled his social media accounts, he accused Lee of bringing “her dying dog” to his establishment, and insisted the dog was “clearly alive” when Lee left with her.

The “scheming” Lee, he said, has “slandered and defamed me and my business” and has “concocted a scheme to extort and defraud me.”

He also claims Lee never paid for his services, and that her claims are “falsehoods in her devious and despicable attempt to extort me and scam my business.”

Grammatikopoulos, 41, said she will not rest until Bejaoui’s out of business, and can’t harm another animal.

“He f–ked with the wrong dog,” she said.