Missing cat found six years after falling out of condo window

Updated: 3:21 PM EDT Jul 31, 2021

A pet lover is celebrating the discovery of her missing cat, who she hasn't seen in six years."It was a miracle," Margaret Cooke said. "I'm so glad that this doctor scanned him and we're bringing him back home on Tuesday. Yes, I'm so happy."Mini Max went through a loose screen in her third-floor condo in Peabody, Massachusetts, six years ago. Cooke tried everything to get him back."When the owner's screen popped out, I was cleaning my windows and looking at the screen, and I could see the little claw marks where he had clawed before he fell out. And it just killed me," Cooke said. Six years later, Mini Max has been located. A veterinarian scanned Mini Max, who had a microchip, and called the reunion. Cooke said the cat ended up at a home in Revere, Massachusetts, but also spent time in the wild. After X-rays, he'll be returned home to his family of rescues next week.

An Ohio woman was reunited with her long-lost cat on Thursday, five and a half years after his initial disappearance. He’d been on a journey of over a thousand miles in the meantime — and he traveled another thousand on his way back.

The owner, Margaret Burcham, said she had resigned herself to never seeing Bernie, a fluffy cream-colored tabby, again. He disappeared from her Florence, Kentucky home in 2015, and her search for him afterward never produced any leads.

“I looked, and I called the shelters and finally just kind of accepted that he was never coming back,” she said.

Until February, when a shelter picked him up in Waco, Texas — 1,080 miles away from Dayton, Ohio, where Burcham now lives.

Volunteers at Heart of Texas Lost and Found Pets assumed the clean, healthy cat must belong to a local family, so they checked his microchip. It sent them back to Burcham.

"How often does something like this happen?” she said Thursday. “Just amazing, and all the way in Texas."

The next question for everyone involved: How would Bernie get back to Ohio? Brandi Neth, a Heart of Texas volunteer, was heading northeast anyway and agreed to ferry him home.

The handoff was Thursday afternoon — Burcham showed up in a sequined mask, and Neth put Bernie back in her arms for the first time in years.

“To be able to come visit my family and bring somebody along and give them the joy of having their animal back, it just makes the trip that much worth it,” Neth said.

No one involved has any idea how Bernie made the journey from Kentucky to Texas the first time. He’s certainly not telling.

“That's what I want to know,” Burcham said. Then, addressing the cat snuggled in her arms: “We need to talk."