When he leapt over the fence of the back garden on Disraeli Road, he was likely expecting a patch of empty grass. What he got was a German shepherd at full pace, and a six-foot-four South African who wanted to know what he thought he was doing. This was no ordinary Saturday afternoon.
On Friday evening we went to meet Gareth Melly, the man behind the citizen’s arrest that made headlines in Thamesfield last week, to hear the story in his own words.
It began with Chief. On Saturday 12 September, Gareth’s German shepherd had been agitated at the back door for a few minutes, wanting out, nothing unusual for a dog. “As I opened the back door, he burst through,” Gareth says. “The guy had literally just landed.” A man in his early twenties, over the fence from next door.
They live in a basement flat on Disraeli Road, Putney, at the end of a long, narrow garden hemmed in by the terraces on either side: no side access, no easy way out once you’re in it. “Chief chased him down and did exactly what you’d expect,” Gareth says. “The guy got a fright. Just froze.” He is proudest of what the dog did not do. “He was actually pretty good. Didn’t grab him. Did exactly what a guard dog’s supposed to do: ran up, scared the guy, contained him. He does this crazy running circle around you. That frightens most people.”
“I was a bit suspicious at the beginning and looked him up and down,” Gareth told Putney.news. “He didn’t have any weapons, I couldn’t see any knives or anything.” So he asked him a couple of questions. “They just weren’t adding up. I said, mate, tell me the truth. Tell the cops the truth and you’ll be let go.” Instead, the man bolted for the second fence. “That’s when I basically just hopped over by the shed and pulled him down.”
He held him there, face down, in a neck hold. “I held him right there for about five minutes, talking to him. He just kept telling me BS stories.” Neighbours on both sides had come to their windows by now. One of them called 999. “As soon as he heard the neighbour on the phone to the cops, he tried to struggle.” The police, he says, arrived five minutes later. “They were very quick.”
The police’s own message to the street that afternoon praised “the residents who showed great courage” for exercising a citizen’s arrest, and made no mention of a dog. But Chief was a key part of it: “He did his job. He was a good guard dog.” Chief was still a little jumpy when we went around to visit but within a few minutes – and his owner’s approval – he dropped a ball at our feet. We threw it. Chief came back. All was good.
Officers arrested the man on suspicion of attempted burglary and criminal damage. He was interviewed, and the Met says a number of enquiries were carried out. The force later released him with no further action, telling this paper the Crown Prosecution Service had found the evidential threshold for charge had not been met: not enough evidence, in other words, that he had tried to break into anywhere.
Before he knew any of that, before he even knew if the man had done anything wrong at all, Gareth was already asking about him.
“Did you get any update with what happened to the poor kid?” he wrote to us the next morning. “Doubt they found anything incriminating.”
He was right. Nobody has established that the man committed any offence that afternoon. He was not charged. There is nothing more to say about him than that: a man who came into a garden, was arrested on suspicion, and was let go with nothing held against him.
Looking back, Gareth does not think the man was dangerous. “I’d handle it a bit differently,” he says. “Be a bit more gentle and patient.” Confronting a stranger in your own garden, he concedes, “is not the British way of doing things.”
He thinks the man got into the row of back gardens through the scout hut on Oxford Road, home to the 1st East Putney Scout Group, currently closed for renovation.
This is not the first sign of trouble on these streets this year. In August, two masked men were filmed peering through a letterbox a few streets away, at half past three in the morning. Gareth’s own car went earlier this year. “We woke up to my car being ransacked,” he says. “They didn’t break the windows or anything, so I don’t know how they got in. It’s quite an old Audi.” It is the kind of theft police have admitted they usually cannot catch.
What Gareth wants now is to find him. “I want to help him,” he says. “Maybe put a message out: if he wants to reach out, it comes through to you. Have a coffee, see what we can do to help him, give him a job. Maybe he was in a desperate situation.” He shrugs. “We all make mistakes in our lives.” So here is the message: if the man wants to get in touch, he can write to us and it will reach Gareth.
This time, somebody was caught, and the person who caught him has spent the days since wondering how to help him instead.
The offer stands.
Great story! Nice to begin my day with something so heartwarming.