by Staff writer
A black-colored cat named Julie from Carmel, a suburban city in Indiana, United States, went missing since 2012.
At the time, Lorinda Roberts, the mother to the cat’s owner, Jon Gulla, relentlessly searched for the cat, but had to refocus her efforts when Gulla was diagnosed with lymphoma shortly after Julie’s escape.
Julie remained missing, but was never far from Gulla and Roberts’ thoughts.
“Every once in a while you find that needle in a haystack,” Roberts told Current in Carmel on why she never gave up hope the cat would be found.
“I was looking for a needle, not a piece of hay. I thought maybe there was a 1 percent chance.”
That 1 percent chance surfaced recently, when an online post describing a stray cat that sounded a lot like Julie appeared online.
The feline in the post was small, black and declawed, just like Gulla’s pet.
According to the post, the nervous cat was living under a Carmel family’s shed, only coming out to accept the food left for her.
Gulla went to visit the feline on the off-chance it could be Julie, and noticed Julie’s unique white spot in the same place on the stray’s belly.
“[He] called her name, and she came out and came right to him,” Christine McKeon, a woman who was also helping care for the cat, said.
Christine was amazed. “She wasn’t that friendly. She wouldn’t come running up to us,” she said.
Gulla and his cat shared a sweet, purr-filled reunion before heading off to restart their life together.
While Julie was found living outdoors, she isn’t injured or emaciated and her fur is relatively soft and clean; signs that she was likely cared for during her time away from Gulla.
🙂 Lovely