Lassie, come home!
And he did.
Sort of. Except in this story the dog is a German shepherd and his name is Astro.
Astro went missing from a Port St. Lucie home nine years ago. In that time, his owners moved three times and ended up in Louisville, Ky.
Then the family members got a call from an animal control officer a few weeks ago in Tennessee telling them they’d found Astro, reports tcpalm.com.
What happened?
Go back nine years when Dennis Geary and his stepdaughter went to the Treasure Coast Humane Society in Palm City to adopt a dog.
That day they left with Astro – a black and off-white German shepherd that weighed about 80 pounds.
A month later, Astro was missing. The Geary family posted signs and called shelters but never found the dog. After a year, they adopted a new dog.
Then, on Jan. 29, an animal control officer in Montgomery County, Tenn., picked up Astro after complaints of a German shepherd running loose in a neighborhood in St. Bethlehem, Tenn.
Animal control officers tracked down Dennis Geary through a microchip implanted when he adopted the dog.
Officers went online to locate Dennis Geary and found two names with Florida connections to call, one at the Louisville address and the other a Tennessee farmer who said the dog wasn’t his.
“I didn’t know what to think,” Dennis Geary said. “I was still in shock. I was excited but apprehensive because I didn’t think he was going to remember me and I didn’t know how he was going to respond.”
Two members of the Geary family went to the shelter three hours from their home.
“They brought him out and he just sat down and licked both me and my oldest stepson,” he said. “He was like, where have you been?”
Nine years. Doggone it!
And they say cats have nine lives?
