WARWICK — In his 24 years on the job, Sgt. Robert C. Rocco had never seen a more bizarre crime.

A city woman is accused of stealing a $500 baby parrot from a local Petco store and cutting off its foot to remove its identification tag. Officers found the bird, alive but bleeding, in the woman’s apartment, the police said.

Earlier this week, the woman allegedly entered the Petco store on Bald Hill Road to inquire about buying a parrot. According to the police, she asked to hold a baby bird and started asking questions about it, saying she had recently bought a similar parrot at another store.

Several minutes later, the clerk noticed that the bird’s cage was empty and the parrot nowhere to be found. The woman was also missing.

“She was the last person to have held the bird and she had expressed a lot of interest in it, so she was the likely suspect,” Rocco said.

Because the woman had mentioned buying a bird at another local store, Petco employees traced the purchase, obtaining the woman’s name and address, and called the Warwick polic.

Yesterday morning, Rocco and Officer Tammy Mello went to Pamela Worden’s apartment at 300 Lambert Lind Hwy. When they knocked on the door, they heard an encouraging sound: birds chirping.

Worden, 56, answered the door. Inside the apartment, they found what was described as a cage with two birds. One was missing its foot and was bleeding, Rocco said.

On a counter nearby, they spotted the amputated foot and next to it the bird’s identification band and a pair of scissors.

“She had [apparently] cut off the parrot’s leg to get the i.d. bracelet off of it,” Rocco said. “It was like a horror movie. She seemed like such an unassuming woman.”

Worden was arrested and charged with one count of felony possession of stolen goods and one count of cruelty to animals, a misdemeanor.

She was scheduled to be arraigned late yesterday in District Court.

“I’ve been doing this for 24 years, and this was probably the most bizarre thing I’ve ever run into,” Rocco said yesterday.

The parrot was taken to Ocean State Veterinary Specialists, in East Greenwich, for treatment. The other bird and a poodle that police also found in the apartment were taken into custody.

A Petco store manager called the incident “an unfortunate theft” but referred all further questions to the store’s corporate offices, where a spokesman confirmed that Petco attaches identification bands to all its birds.

cneedham@projo.com