The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
STRANDED SOPHIE SAFE AND SOUND
Family’s ordeal comes to an end when fire crews save diabetic, blind American Eskimo hound stuck on island in a rainstorm
The situation looked bleak for 9-year-old Sophie, a diabetic, nearly blind American Eskimo who went missing from her East Main Street home late Wednesday — a cold, rainy night with intermittent downpours.
Marcus Keilch and his wife, Bernice Rosa, knew their 12-year-old son Anthony’s dog, who went missing around 9:30 p.m., would be in grave danger if she went without her twice-a-day insulin shots.
Keilch said Rosa had let Sophie, who also has Lyme disease, out the side door as he was doing paperwork in his home office. Five minutes later, he heard a car stop outside but thought it was the neighbors.
"It’s very important that we found her when we did. I don’t know how long she would have gone before she did go into some kind of shock or something.” — Middletown Animal Control Officer Gail Petras
“I live on Main Street so for cars to stop and doors to open and close, it’s not a big deal.”
He called for Sophie to no avail, Keilch said.
“We have a fenced-in front yard with an outlet of stairs. Sophie cannot climb stairs, so someone would have to grab her,” Keilch said.
Nearly 15 hours later, 65-pound Sophie was found on a little island in the center of a stream that winds between Dorothy Drive and Millbrook Road, according to South Fire Chief Robert Road. Firefighter Jason Hurlbut donned a cold-water suit and coaxed the dog onto an ice sled. “It was a relatively quick operation,” Ross said.
“I can’t believe that I got her back. I’m in utter shock,” Marcus Keilch said Friday afternoon. “I was going to have a funeral for her at 8 o’clock last night because she basically would be dead at that point.” That’s when Sophie’s third insulin shot since she’d gone missing would have been due.
The family had even offered a $1,000 reward for Sophie’s safe return.
Middletown Animal Control Officer Gail Petras contacted Keilch with the good news at about 2:30 p.m. Thursday.
“She called me and said, ‘Marcus, I am about a mile from your house and I’m looking at Sophie. She’s on an island in the river.’
“And I said, ‘No way! Gail, I love you, you are the best! I will see you as fast as I can — I’m coming from Manchester.’ … and I flew home,” said Keilch, who runs a construction company.
Rosa said she hadn’t slept at all in two days. She was up all night Wednesday trying to find Sophie, who is also lame on her left side. “I went out at 2 a.m. after making posters for an hour and a half,“Rosa said. “I was only home for a half-hour between 2 a.m. (Wednesday) to 3:30 p.m. (Thursday)” to bring her kids to school, she added.
Keilch, Rosa and their 18-year-old son Steven looked for the dog for hours that night as Anthony slept. “It’s very out-of-character for her to run off and especially for her to not come when her name is called. It was dark out and she is practically blind,” Rosa said.
Officer Giuseppe Lombardo had spent 45 minutes driving around the neighborhood with the search light on his cruiser, Keilch said.
After receiving the great news, Keilch arrived home to find Sophie in a pet carrier in the back of Petras’ truck.
Sophie, who he said is “not super outgoing — you have to give her a treat to get her to wag her tail and come up and say ‘hi’ to you” — was overjoyed to be back.
“I picked her up, got her in a warm bath, started to get her cleaned up, dried off, gave her some insulin and something to eat, checked her blood sugar — which was dangerously low — she took a nap and woke up this morning,” he said.
“She was filthy. We dried her off with towels warmed up in a dryer and gave her her medication,” Rosa said.
Sophie’s nature is “chill,” Keilch said. “She’s really relaxed. She’s my little sweetheart.” She and Anthony “used to a lot of hiking when she was younger but now not so much because she’s getting up there. They grew up together, he said, adding that the dog is a constant companion and very low-maintenance.
Sophie, who Keilch adopted at 8 months old, has never wandered off in the nine years he has had her.
“She couldn’t have left the yard, gone down to the river and swam upstream a mile. It’s not possible. She can’t walk around my house without help,” said Keilch, who is convinced someone took his pet.
Petras said the dog was found less than quartermile from her house: six houses over from where she lives.
“We have no evidence that the dog was stolen,” Petras said. “It seems more logical that the dog just wandered and she’s blind and somehow found her way around the fence and wound up where she didn’t know where she was.”
Petras said Middletown doesn’t have a high rate of animal thefts.
“At night, she may have wandered into the water without realizing and it wasn’t quite as deep then because it hadn’t rained so much yet. Maybe she walked across, got to the middle, and she settled in because she didn’t know what to do,” Petras said. “Then it rained really hard and the water got a lot deeper and she just stayed there.”
When firefighters got to her, Sophie was standing up and alert, Petras said. “I was really encouraged that she looked like she in better shape than I had anticipated she would be. She was able to stand up and turn around but clearly she was exhausted and she wasn’t able to walk more than a few steps without sitting down. “She was wobbly on her legs so I’m sure she was feeling the effects of the delayed insulin.”
Although she never lost faith that the family would find Sophie — “I knew we would” — the boys were afraid and cried during the ordeal, Rosa said.
“Animal rescues are always tough for us because it’s always a judgment call about the risk and it’s somebody’s pet, but we know we can either go out and get the dog or we can go out and get the dog and the owner,” Ross said.
“At the end of the day, we want to avoid people taking on unnecessary risks. Our staff are more equipped and more capably trained to do something like that,” the chief added. “The water in that area was moving along at a pretty good pace. It wasn’t a very risky call but with the flooded conditions, it was better that we sent somebody out there with the proper equipment.”
Rosa said Sophie is doing “fantastic. She had a good night’s sleep last night and she’s running around the backyard.”
“Gail is a hero and deserves a superhero cape,” Keilch said. “I know a lost dog is not a huge priority. The police department is fantastic — they are so caring and they’re really so compassionate,” he added.
Rosa said she also grateful to the people who shared the Facebook post about Sophie being missing and very appreciative to Main Street businesses and area homeowners who put up posters as she searched desperately.
“It’s very important that we found her when we did,” Petras said. “I don’t know how long she would have gone before she did go into some kind of shock or something.”