It's not hard to find pit bull puppies for sale on Craigslist. The tricky part is finding a seller, like 38-year-old Bryant Everett, willing to make the trip from his home in Fort Worth with three of the pups in a crate in the back in hopes of getting $150 for each one.

The request for home delivery perhaps should have raised red flags for Everett, but it's not like he was walking into a dark back alley. The deal was supposed to go early Thursday afternoon on the part of the street in front of the Homes of Persimmon apartment complex on Simpson Stuart road in Southeast Oak Cliff, so he wasn't overly cautious when he pulled up at the appointed spot at 2:15 p.m.

He found the man he'd been texting with and showed him the puppies. The man said he was interested in buying one and that his sister might want another, but that she was in the shower. Then, he picked up all three puppies and began to walk away.

Everett stopped him and said that, if he was going to take them all, the man owed $450. The man responded by raising his shirt to reveal a handgun tucked in his waistband. If that wasn't enough to dissuade Everett from snatching back his puppies, then the man who emerged from behind the complex pointing a gun and saying "Break yourself, nigga," certainly was.

Everett watched the first man, the one who'd taken the puppies, walk into apartment 2106, which was where he'd said he lived when they were arranging the sale. He waited a few minutes, then knocked on the door and asked where the puppies were. The girl who answered the door said they weren't inside the apartment, and her mother said the same thing. Sure enough, when officers showed up, there was no sign of the dogs.

He gave police the phone number the man had been using, then drove back to Fort Worth.