Cold, tired, and hungry is how Melinda Mitchell described her lost two-and-a-half-year-old wheaten terrier, Coco, who had run off after deer one night last week. The next day, Wednesday, Jan. 10, Mitchell posted “My little Coco is missing” to Nextdoor Harvard’s lost and found category. It was a last-ditch effort to find her dog.
Coco Mitchell comes home cold and hungry, but otherwise unscathed. (Courtesy photos)
“I’m always the one doing things myself, not asking for help,” said Mitchell in a phone interview. “But without Robert Curran starting Nextdoor, I wouldn’t have been able to reach out to all these people who are willing to lend a helping hand.”
At the point when Mitchell sent her message out to Nextdoor, her dog situation was fast becoming dire. Coco had already spent one night in 23-degree weather, and the forecast for the following evening was in the single digits. Recently shorn and without a coat, Coco had run off with her leash dragging behind her.
The story of the search and rescue for Coco is an example of Harvard’s neighborliness at its best, as well as an example of the Nextdoor platform’s ability to build community.
A call to action
The Nextdoor alert went up at 1:30 p.m., and by midafternoon, several Harvard residents had read the post and some had gone out looking for Coco. Among them was Jessie Panek, with her dog Jazz.
“I was planning on taking Jazz out for a walk anyway and decided to take my snowshoes to the area where Coco had gone missing,” Panek told the Press.
Search and rescue
Panek, on snowshoes, and Jazz—her 9-year-old black Labrador and bloodhound mix—went hiking through the woods, on and off snowmobile trails, in the area where Coco was lost. Panek related the following story:
Jazz Panek picks up a scent.
“Then, all of a sudden, Jazz perked up like there was something that caught her attention and I thought ‘well, that’s very interesting.’ It was the kind of thing she does when she sees a rabbit, but it was different. I started following her and let her lead us. And so we went for a ways.
“Then she started to go off somewhere where there were no tracks, and it was getting late, and the sun was getting close to setting, and we had been out for a long time, so I said, ‘OK, Jazz, it’s about time to turn around.’ We turned around and started back a little bit. She perked up again and went back the other direction, so I said, ‘Oh, OK, Jazz, we’ll try this.’
“We were maybe 100 feet off the snowmobile trail and came over a little rise. I just about dropped everything because suddenly there was Coco!”
Panek said Coco’s leash was tangled around two trees and her foot, but not in a way that it hurt her. Coco appeared excited and happy to see her rescuers, though she was not frantic, said Panek, “and she never barked.”
Panek called Mitchell right away, even as she was untangling Coco. The two humans met at the edge of the woods, and Coco was delivered, unharmed, to the warmth of Mitchell’s car and to hugs from her son.
Citizen of the Year?
Happy tidings poured out on Nextdoor. Jessie and Jazz were thanked, as well as Nextdoor itself, as was Robert Curran for having brought this neighborhood social network to Harvard. In a later post, it was Curran who first proposed nominating Jazz for Harvard’s Citizen of the Year. Susan Leeming expanded the nomination to include Panek, a move that was seconded by a host of members.
Reflecting on the events, Panek said, “Jazz, a Sterling shelter rescue dog, rescuing another dog. Well, that’s pretty amazing!”
