Military Family Awaits Reunion With Long Lost Cat
OAKLAND (CBS SF) -- Anyone who has lost a beloved pet knows the kind of pain the Thomas family has gone through.
Six years ago, the Thomas family lived in the Bay Area when Jeff Thomas was stationed here in the military. Shortly after moving into a home in Hayward, their beloved pet cat Mellow ran off.
They searched for the wayward feline, even returning to the neighborhood after they had moved to a new home in San Leandro months later. In 2015, James Thomas was transferred to Georgia and the family lost all hope of ever seeing Mellow again.
Then Ilona Thomas got a phone call. Mellow had turned up in the Bay Area.
"We were both overwhelmed with joy and just cried," Ilona Thomas wrote on her Facebook page. "We stayed on the phone for a good amount of time just talking about Mellow. Words can't express how thankful I am that this wonderful person noticed a friendly cat in her neighborhood and decided to get him scanned for a microchip."
Petra Stojka and her husband Armstrong found the cat roaming around their Hayward neighborhood. When they found him, he was dirty and underweight, but friendly.
"People in the complex recognized him because he had been wandering around for a couple of years," Stojka told KPIX 5. "So it kind of seemed like to us that he may have had an owner, but that nobody had really bothered to take him to a veterinarian and have him scanned for a chip."
The Good Samaritan even paid for Mellow to get shots and now the family is counting the days until they are reunited.
"She was crying, I started crying. We were both just so happy because stories like this just don't really happen," Stojka said.
The Thomas family has set up a Go Fund Me Page to help with the cost of flying Mellow to Georgia.