News

Actions

Kzoo dog mom reunited with her pet after searching for him for 12 days in cold, snowy Pennsylvania

Posted at 3:54 PM, Jan 11, 2019
and last updated 2019-01-11 23:29:59-05

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — Jessica Alvarez fell in love with her dog Nash the moment she met him in October, she said. She saw him and another dog walking along the road in Kalamazoo when she and a friend picked them up and took them to an animal shelter. Eight days later she adopted him. She’s been singing to him ever since, she said.

“If only I can have a puppy … Maybe I can be so lucky,” Jessica sang while petting Nash, a rottweiler/doberman mix. “Just to have some company … Have a cup of tea with me.”

It was a song made famous by singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson that Jessica and Nash enjoyed, she said. It’s a song she sang a lot in early January when she was looking for Nash in a remote part of Pennsylvania.

"It feels kind of like a bad dream," Jessica said. "But I know that it happened."

Jessica said back on Wednesday December 26 she and her boyfriend Gary were driving home to Michigan after spending Christmas Break in New York. They were on I-80 early that morning when they got into a car accident.

“I was asleep and I woke up to Gary grabbing me and we were in the rubble strips,” Jessica said. “There had been a deer in the roadway. So he swerved to miss the deer and we hit the median and rolled three times to the left.”

Jessica and Gary were fine, she said. However the dogs had been ejected through the back windows. The next thing she remembers, she said, was PennDOT workers helping her and Gary out of the car. When Jessica was steady, she took off running looking for Jordy and Nah.

“I just started running down the side of the highway, screaming for them and looking for them for I don’t even know how long,” Jessica said. “There was a state trooper being like ‘ma’am you crossed the highway four times. That’s probably not a really good idea.'”

So she and Gary then got into an ambulance and were later checked out and released from  the hospital, she said. The following day they were back at I-80. People told them that they saw a green light run towards the woods. Jessica knew that it was from Jordy’s collar. So she went to the area and found Jordy sitting on the ground.

“She just was a pile of smiles and wiggles,” Jessica said about reuniting with Jordy. “I was just like ‘it’s you.’”

Jessica picked her up but continued to look for Nash, she said. However, no one had seen him. By this time she had a group of people, consisting of friends and a pet recovery organization, looking for him.

“But then Saturday morning somebody called us and said ‘you know I think that there was a dog sleeping on my porch,” Jessica remembered the person saying to her over the phone. “‘There’s an outline of body. It looks like a dog, too small to be a bear.’”

Jessica immediately rushed to the house and sat there for four hours waiting for him to return, she said. However he didn’t. She then went back to the hotel. The pet recovery group called and said another person saw him by a local diner. Jessica booked it there and she saw Nash along the highway. When she got close to him, he didn’t get close to her.

“He was a wild animal,” Jessica said. “He didn’t even look like himself. His whole body was tense. Every muscle was flexed.”

Nash then ran away, she said. Jessica spent the next few days on and off the phone with people calling about when and where they last saw Nash. Desperate to find her dog, she  went to Walmart and spent $250 buying a grill and some meat to cook. She grilled the food  and left them on the ground. She hoped he'd smell it, eat it and then see her.

“I’d sit and just cook sausage and bacon and ground beef,” Jessica said.  “I would sing the puppy song to him.”

The one Jessica sang at home to him, she said. She did this for at least a week until someone spotted Nash at their home.

“Finally on Sunday somebody called and said ‘he fell asleep in our backyard because my wife threw our Christmas ham out and he ate it,'” Jessica recalled.

Jessica went to that house and did the same thing, she said. She cooked food and left it out. At this point it started to snow outside but Jessica was;t going back in. She’d seen him once again before he darted back into the woods.

“It’s 22 degrees,” Jessica posted online. “If Nash is outside. I’m outside. Like it’s ‘OK buddy I’m here for you.’”

The next day, Monday, she returned to the house and began grilling. She left the food out and went inside the house. Then, through her binoculars she saw him pop out of the woods. So she took off her hat and bolted for the door. She sat down on the ground, with no hat one so that Nash can see her face. She began talking to him and singing to him. He eventually began moving toward her, she said.

“I reached out like this and he just put his head right into my hand,” Jessica said. “I held onto his collar and I had the leash around my neck and I just clipped it. But he melted like a popsicle into my lap.”

Jessica cried. So did Nash. She immediately called Gary who had already driven back to Kalamazoo with Jordy for work.

“Did a little FaceTime, saw him. He’s a little skinny,” Gary said.  “But he looked otherwise pretty pretty good.”

Jessica then continued to their drive back home to Michigan, she said. She “white-knuckled” it the whole way she said. She and Gary are looking into buying their dogs GPS collars and custom-made seat belts. Nevertheless she's grateful to have Nash right back home with her.

“Oh hey guys. Like you know how I said I was going to find my dog today,” Jessica said on SnapChat with tears in her eyes. “Look who I got: Nash.”