LYNN HAVEN — It’s been a week since the home remodeling project and the lost diamond distracted Kyle and Leah Pitts and their two children long enough for Callie to get outside and disappear.
Kyle was working and Leah was searching for a stone that had fallen from her ring.
When they noticed she was missing, they figured Callie, a roughly five-pound Chihuahua the Pitts family got as a puppy more than 7 years ago, had gotten spooked by the noise from the air compressor and was hiding under a bed or something.
But Callie didn’t come to the table for dinner that evening, setting off a whirlwind five-day search that compelled perfect strangers to donate money for a reward or to search the woods in the rain.
Before the story ended happily with the family crying on the side of a busy road Monday night, people would be injured and there would be a frantic chase through the woods. Kyle was still a little excited Tuesday afternoon.
“I feel like I just came out of like a freaking Indiana Jones movie,” Kyle said Tuesday.
Word spread quickly that Callie was missing. Leah and her mother, Kathy Heirs, posted notice that spread across Facebook quickly. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of Facebook users shared the photo.
Kyle, who is not a Facebook user, went old school in his search for the family pet: first to a local print shop, where a friend hooked him up with a reduced rate on flyers and posters to post all over town. Then he went and bought every single wooden stake available at two stores.
The flyers and posters showed up all over town. At Mowat Middle School, Alexis Pitts’ teachers helped pass the flyers out, she said. While Kyle was driving stakes into the ground along highways, people who had learned about Callie on Facebook would call out to him from passing cars.
“We’re searching right now,” strangers would say, or “we’re praying you find your dog.”
At first Kyle wondered how they knew what was going on.
“I would go around and people would like, know…How do people know?” he said.
He has always been a little “anti-Facebook,” and while he hasn’t created his own account just yet, he has changed his opinion on the site.
“Now I’m like, dude, the power of Facebook is in-SANE,” he said.
Heirs found some Facebook pages concerned with lost and found items in Panama City and shared Callie’s picture; she broke the rules of a yard sale page and posted the photo there too.
A woman the Pitts’s had never met spent her days off searching the woods in the rain. While she was at work she followed Facebook closely for news. She didn’t want a reward, only the chance to meet Callie and the family when she was found.
Another volunteer member of the search party went into the woods with his dog. They thought they heard something, but what they found was a bee hive or a hornet’s nest. Kyle heard yelps and screams and ran to find them. Both had been stung. Kyle picked up the dog and the two men ran from the woods with bees or hornets in pursuit.
“He’s like Braveheart now, slaying three-headed dragons,” Leah joked.
On Sunday night, Tony McClellan and his wife were driving from church and they passed a small dog sitting on the side of County 390. McClellan remarked to his wife about the dog, but they were busy and kept driving.
Callie had been missing since Wednesday. By Monday night, Leah had begun to lose hope the tiny pet could survive another night outdoors. Callie had a led a sheltered life, after all; the family sometimes called her princess because of the way she had been pampered.
The next day, one of McClellan’s wife’s co-workers brought up the topic of the missing Chihuahua. She sent McClellan a picture that he recognized as the dog he’d seen the night before.
“There’s no way” the dog would still be around, McClellan thought toward the spot where he’d seen the dog the night before.
“I had this feeling that I should go back and look…low and behold, my light hit two little eyeballs down in the ditch,” McClellan said.
Callie wouldn’t let McClellan pick her up, so he waited while word spread—through Facebook again—back to Kathy Heirs that Callie might have been found. When Heirs called Kyle and Leah, they were across the street replacing signs that were destroyed by rain the day before.
Kyle jumped into the ditch. It was Callie. She had some cuts and scrapes and maybe hookworms, but she was healthy.
“He was ecstatic to say the least,” McClellan said. “We have a small house dog ourselves, and they have a way of getting you wrapped around them.”
The Pitts family started to cry. Kyle, who admitted to being a little excitable, was especially overwhelmed, everyone agreed.
“We just wanted it so badly,” Kyle said. “And it happened!”
They put the dog in the car to warm up. Kyle insisted on giving McClellan a reward. He refused it.
“I’m certain they could use that money,” McClellan said. “They have two small children of their own.”
When Kyle went through a fast food drive thru later Monday night, he saw one of the signs. He told the employees that he would like to remove it now because Callie was found. The employees rejoiced, cheering and high-fiving each other.
“I’m not quite sure what we did to get everybody so invested in it,” Kyle said.
When they got home, 2-year-old Saylor Pitts, thought it was Christmas and ran to get presents.
“It was our little Christmas miracle,” Leah said.
The Pitts had a hard time trying to put into words what the generosity of their community meant to them. How could they thank the people who had helped them when they don’t even know them?
“We had people we never met in our lives offering us money for a reward to find our dog,” Kyle said. “We had people we never met in our lives trekking through the woods.”
This demonstration of “humanity at its finest, man,” as Kyle described it, left the family grasping for some way to pay it forward.
“I just wish I had millions of dollars,” Kyle said. “I would just drive through Lynn Haven throwing money out.”