On the morning of Saturday, April 8, Rocky and Joanna Owens woke up to find that their beloved cat, Bongo, was gone.
To the family, Bongo is more than just a pet. They welcomed him into their home during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, bonding their family during stressful times.
“I’ve never had a cat less than 15 years. Our last cat lived to be 21,” Joanna says. “Bongo is only 2 1/2 years old. Our hearts are broken over this.”
Rocky last saw his cat on their home surveillance recording.
“We have a video of him sitting in the middle of the backyard. These cameras always record about a minute and then shut off until there’s motion again. All of a sudden it goes to the next video, and he just disappears. It was a real head-scratcher.”
Since then, the search has been on. The family covered their neighborhood and surrounding streets with signs featuring Bongo’s face and a phone number — huge roadside posters advertise a $3,500 reward for the Munchkin Scottish Fold with Garfieldian orange fur.
“We’re pretty introverted. This has us hanging a 10-foot banner with our cat on it,”Joanna says. “Everyone knows where our house is, both of our cell phone numbers, where the cat belongs, the money we’re offering for him.”
The signs are hard to miss, with a huge photo of Bongo’s beady eyes on a loud, mustard yellow background. Photos of the signs have been reposted across neighborhood sites, and there are threads on Reddit and TikTok.
“There’s a woman who lives next door that said more people were talking about Bongo at the polls on Election Day than who was actually running,” Joanna says. “Then I get all the prank calls from kids meowing into the phone.”
After the initial wave of the street signs and door-to-door fliers, the Owenses still had no leads, prompting them to try online pet lost-and-found sites.
Someone texted the Owenses saying he knew where Bongo was along with an address in DeSoto. “It was so detailed,” Joanna recalls. “We drove down there and knocked on the door, and this guy answers, and he’s like, ‘I don’t have your cat.’”
The man explained to the confused couple that he was a victim of a targeted attack by hackers that infiltrated the lost-and-found system and sent out automated messages to families with missing pets saying that he had their animal.
Rocky and Joanna found themselves back at square one, though not without further intrigue.
Joanna says someone called the cops on her for knocking on their door, and that wasn’t the couple’s only run-in with potential legal issues.
“Rocky got a call from a woman [who] basically told him that we were going to get a $200 a day fine if we kept the signs up,” Joanna explains. “My approach to that was that if I can’t go to jail, fine me, I don’t care.”
Joanna wasn’t too bothered by the call until she began receiving videos sent by neighbors of the caller, “at 10 o’clock at night going into people’s yards and taking the signs.”
Desperate, the Owenses turned to a supernatural source.
“One of our neighbors texted Rocky and said, ‘I know this sounds like an insane idea, but I’ve used this person because I’ve had a lot of trouble losing animals at my house. She’s an animal communicator, and I think you should call her.’”
The idea behind animal communication services is that these experts are able to understand a pet’s feelings and behaviors by reaching their conscience telepathically. In the case of Bongo, the communicator would, hopefully, tap into the cat’s psyche to psychically locate him.
“We did call this woman and talk to her. She asked me to send her a picture of Bongo. She said that he was in a house with an older woman. That’s kind of all she told us,” Joanna says. “She said the energy she got from him is that he’s regretful, but he’s safe, and he knows he’s going to be OK.”
She also gave Joanna the number of another animal communicator, who told her essentially the same thing, that Bongo was with a woman and safe, that the woman loved Bongo. Both psychics said the woman was calling the cat “cutie.”
The second “communicator” told Joanna she knew nothing of her conversation with the first pet psychic.
If nothing else, the similarities between both communicators eased the family’s fears and increased their optimism.
“I feel like we have 20 new best friends that check on us daily, from the animal communicators to our neighbors, to people online reposting us,” Joanna says.
People are invested. They want Bongo home as much as they want the Owenses to be happy.
“A lot of people just call because they want to talk,” she says. “I had some woman sit and talk to me about her diabetic cat for 45 minutes one night. I had somebody text me the other day and say, ‘Hey we live in New York City, but if he makes it here we’ll find him.’ We are living in a bizarro world, I get it. But nonetheless, we’re here.”
Rocky and Joanna continue to hold out hope, even six months after Bongo went missing.
“So many people have lost so much in the past 3 1/2 years,” Rocky says. “I lost my father, my best friend, many other friends. When you’ve lost one more thing, and you feel like there’s something you can do about it, you think, I’m not losing this one too. Any phone call that comes in could be that one lead. You just get obsessed with it.”
If Bongo is still out there, he could return to a home filled with new friends and experiences, but a home that still loves him. Until that day comes, if it ever does, Rocky and Joanna Owens continue to search.
“I don’t know when to call it quits,” Joanna says. “I think there will always be a part of me and my heart that will be seeking him out.”
