Lindsay Perkins was navigating a hectic Tuesday morning in mid-June at her home in Luling, getting ready to leave her home for a funeral with friend Kari Kimmel, when she discovered her family’s aging indoor pet, Scout, was missing. When a quick search of her Gregory Drive home turned up nothing, panic quickly set in.
“We’ve had the dog longer than we’ve had our kids – she’s an important [part of our family],” Perkins said.
The Perkins family’s cherished 16-year-old Yorkie mix was blind from cataracts in both her eyes and almost completely deaf, and was nowhere to be found – nowhere in the Perkins house, nowhere immediately outside their home and in none of the obvious places she’d wandered before. Hurricane Ida had taken out fencing in their large backyard, and an open fence line meant if Scout got out, she could wander anywhere, with no way to get back on her own without sight or hearing.
Perkins, 43, called her husband who promised to leave his downtown New Orleans office job as soon as he could to help search for the family dog, then posted an alert on the neighborhood Facebook page just in case any neighbors were able to find her. Unable to leave her disabled pet out in the open alone, she then cancelled her morning arrangements with friend Kimmel and began searching for Scout.
She double-checked her home, closets and other indoor areas, walked her neighborhood, then walked to the local park searching for her pet. She finally resorted to driving around in her car, combing the local area for Scout. With her efforts turning up no signs of her pet, she moved to the rear of her yard, frantically attempting to search a nearby drainage ditch, still in heels she put on for the funeral.
It was then that her friend Kari’s mother, Judy Lind, reached out to her to offer help. Lind had her grandson Griffin Kimmel with her, and the pair headed towards Perkins’ home so that Perkins wasn’t searching for Scout alone. Given the dog’s age and medical problems, Perkins feared she may have lost her dog for good.
“I thought she was gone,” Perkins said. “I couldn’t imagine where she went, but I just didn’t think that we’d ever see her again. I have a friend with a really old dog who disappeared when he was 16 or 17 years old, and they never found him again –that’s what I was thinking about.”
When Lind and her grandson Kimmel, 11, arrived, they launched into their quest for Scout at Perkins’ house, then began asking the local UPS driver, mailman and any others they came across if they’d come across Scout.
“We drove all over that neighborhood,” Lind said. “We approached every and anybody we saw outside.”
When their initial efforts yielded no results, Griffin remained undeterred. Working on a hunch, he convinced his grandmother to head back to the nearby Perkins house while he checked one last place they hadn’t checked yet – a long drainage ditch area nearby he and his friends sometimes used as shortcut from his house to access the local park.
“I went on a little dirt path where my friends and I go to the park, and I saw a little something moving in the ditch,” Kimmel, who was coincidentally named Lakewood Elementary’s 2023 Student of the Year, said.
It was there in the drainage ditch that the young Kimmel found the missing dog Scout, her fur coat covered in plant stickers after wandering through tall grass along the drainage ditch, with no way to get back home on her own.
“So then I carried her out, and it was very steep; it was hard to get out,” Kimmel said. “[Scout] was very shaky and scared, because she had no idea where she was and couldn’t hear me.”
At that moment, Lind was back with Perkins at her home in the front yard, consoling her. Perkins was worrying about how she would tell her three children their beloved family pet had been lost – when just then, Kimmel rounded the corner of Perkin’s home with a dirty – but safe – Scout in his arms.
“[Lindsay] just broke down in tears, I started crying…it was a beautiful thing to witness,” Lind said of seeing her grandson reunite Perkins with her pet Scout.
After all of the excitement, the Perkins and Kimmel families got together again on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 28 to visit and reminisce with Scout on their small adventure.
“I was just overjoyed, I was so thankful he found her,” Perkins said after her family’s pet was returned. “I’m very grateful for our friendship with the Kimmel family – it’s helped us in more ways than just one.”
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