After days of searching, a cat accidentally thrown out with a couch is reunited with his family.
Mike, an 8-year-old domestic short hair, has been part of Washington, D.C. reporter Neal Augenstein’s family for more than six years, but about a week ago, Mike didn’t show up for dinner.
“For a couple of days, I walked around the neighborhood holding a bag of treats going, ‘Mike, Mike! Mike, Mike! Mike, Mike!’” Augenstein told NBC Washington. “And I would stand in front of sewers — no luck. I walked around the block. And it really was a mystery. That was the hardest part, not knowing where he was.”
After two days of searching the neighborhood, Augenstein thought about the three couches he had thrown out before he noticed Mike was missing.
“[I was] having a sinking feeling that the cat was in the couch,” he said.
So, it was off to the junk warehouse, but that was another dead end. The couch had already been taken to a landfill.
The prospect of finding Mike at the Interstate 66 transfer station didn’t look good.
“When stuff is dumped here, that’s going to be crushed and going to go to the landfill,” Augenstein said. “So, it was so close to being a tragedy.”
Tragedy was averted, however, thanks to Mauricio Martinez, a heavy equipment operator at the landfill who noticed something in distress in the pit where they dump trash.
“And he seems scared,” Martinez told NBC Washington. “And he was, like, trapped. And it was a big drop.”
He called his supervisor.
“Sure enough, there was a cat on the ledge of the pit,” said Joshua Murphy, assistant superintendent at the landfill.
That ledge is about 15 feet above the asphalt and 4 feet below the top, he said. And there wasn’t enough room for Mike to jump.
“It took us about 10 minutes to get the cat down from the time we noticed it,” Murphy said. “Came up with the plan, took a loader bucket underneath and had to be a little persuasive with the cat to get it to jump, because it didn’t want to move at all.”
While Mike made it out of the trash pit safely, that wasn’t the end of his adventure. He got away from the landfill crew and crawled through a tunnel into a storage room.
Then it was animal control’s turn to catch Mike.
After learning about Mike’s journey, Augenstein went to a nearby animal rescue and was told Mike had just been transferred to a different shelter.
Finally, after four days of searching and Mike nearly losing one of his lives, cat and owner were reunited.
“I think that he still has a little bit of the smell of the transfer station on him, but that’s fading away,” Augenstein said.
“There were so many hands touched Mike, and there were so many places where things could have gone very badly, but things turned out perfectly, and I’m delighted to have him home,” he said.
Augenstein thanked Mike’s rescuers Tuesday.
“Just an amazingly happy ending, and I’m so thankful to everyone who played a part in it,” he said.
“You know, everyone loves a happy ending and everyone loves to tell a story that turns out well,” Augenstein said. “Obviously, there’s plenty of news stories that don’t, but I’m really happy and pleased to have the chance to tell a good news story.”
This story originally appeared on NBCWashington.com.
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