The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption

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CATALINA RETURNED FROM HER trip to Croatia on August 23, 2008, a Thursday. The night before, she had been unable to sleep. She didn’t know what was keeping her awake, but as she tossed in bed Jasmine’s well-being was on her mind. Eventually, Catalina got up and walked across the hotel room to the window. Looking up into the sky she saw a star so huge and so bright that she woke her husband to come look at it. It was unlike anything she’d seen, and she wondered if it was a planet or if she was witnessing some sort of astrological event. She wondered if it was Jasmine lighting up the way home for her.

The next afternoon her family arrived safely at her in-laws’ house, and she took a minute to check in with Karen Reese, the vice president of Recycled Love. “How is Jasmine?” she asked when she heard Karen’s voice come on the line. There was a pause, a momentary hesitation, a shift in tone.

“Catalina,” Karen said with unwavering calm, “Jasmine is gone.”

Catalina didn’t understand. It didn’t register. “Gone?” she said. “Where did she go?”

Seconds ticked by. Catalina heard her children playing in the next room, her husband talking to his parents in Croatian. She waited. Karen’s voice came through the receiver again. “Catalina, Jasmine is gone.”

On Monday, August 19, Catalina’s friend Robert had arisen in her house and set about caring for his two dogs and Jasmine. He fed them, he gave them water, he let them out in the yard. Jasmine had been holding up. She didn’t seem happy but she was surviving, getting by, as she always did.

In the afternoon, Robert decided to take the dogs for a walk in a nearby park that Jasmine liked. As they made their way around, one of Robert’s dogs started to yelp and limp. Robert moved in to investigate. The dog had stepped on some broken glass. Robert brushed it off but there were a few little embedded pieces. As he tried to work them free the dog continued to whine and bark, nipping at his hands a little and trying to pull its leg away. Engrossed in the task and struggling against the dog, Robert blocked out everything else around him. The other leashes slipped from his hand.

Within a few minutes he was able to clear the last shards of glass from the dog’s foot. He looked up. His other dog was standing right next to him and Jasmine was not far off, either. She had continued slowly sniffing her way along the path, and now stood maybe twenty feet away.

Catching Jasmine when she was not tethered to anything could still be a chore for anyone who was not Catalina. For all the progress Jasmine had made, for all the manners and training she’d acquired, that one quirk remained. A lingering fear instilled in her from her past life that continued to dictate her future.

Robert tried to very calmly walk toward her, hoping he could get close enough to grab the leash before Jasmine even noticed she’d been set free. He’d hardly made it two steps when Jasmine turned to look at him. She held her head low, tucked between her shoulders. He froze.

He bent down to one knee and called her, the cheeriness in his voice masking the anxiety rising within him. “Jasmine. Come ’ere, Jasmine. Come on.” Jasmine turned her head and looked across the expanse of the park. One side of it was bordered by a farm, where tall stalks of late summer corn waved in the breeze.

She looked back at Robert and appeared for all the world to be considering her options. She couldn’t know that Catalina was only four days away. She only knew that the afternoons on the deck with Desmond were gone. The walks and the massages were gone. The singing was gone. The love was gone.

Jasmine turned away from Robert and headed for the cornfield at a trot. Robert immediately turned and ran back to his car. He put his dogs inside and sprinted for the field, calling Jasmine’s name. As he moved along the outer edge of the corn he came upon a kid, an eleven-or twelve-year-old boy riding his bike. The boy agreed to help and the two of them walked through the field calling for Jasmine. From time to time they would get a glimpse of her, a flash of brown running through the stalks, or hear the jingle of her leash and collar, but they could never find her. They could never get their hands on her.

It had been hours and Robert began to worry about his own dogs, locked up in the car. He thanked the boy for his help then drove back to Catalina’s. He dropped his dogs and tracked down a friend who agreed to meet him back at the farm. The two walked the grounds and the surrounding area, calling, searching. They went home only after it was too dark to see.

The next day the police found Jasmine’s body on Liberty Road. After examining the scene, they surmised that she’d been struck by a car and killed instantly.

Catalina didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t really cry, either. She didn’t do anything. It was as if she’d simply shut down inside. She felt as though she needed to be strong for everyone else. On the phone, Karen had been so distraught that Catalina ended up comforting her. From what she’d been told Robert was beside himself, and she was heading over there first thing in the morning to see him. After that she would still have to tell her kids and field calls from people at the rescue. She would have to tell all of them that it was no one’s fault, and that it could have happened to anyone, which she truly believed. The problem was that she’d also have to say everything was all right and that she would be okay, but she wasn’t at all sure that was true.

When she finally got to Robert, he was inconsolable. He couldn’t even speak. He simply cried and cried and Catalina did what she could to make him feel better. The kids took it with more aplomb. “Jasmine had to leave us,” Catalina told them. “She had to go to heaven.” The family had lost two other dogs over the years, so the children were familiar with the concept. They were old enough to understand the idea and young enough not to question it.

And so she moved from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, taking calls, answering e-mails, sorting through her feelings without ever truly feeling them. A week went by, ten days. The maelstrom passed. The phone stopped and the e-mails stopped and the world moved on. Then it was just Catalina, alone in the house.

A local artist, inspired by Jasmine’s story, had painted a picture of her, and it had been given to Catalina as a gift. Catalina hung it on the wall in her daughter’s room. Then she and her daughter painted butterflies and hung them around the outside of the painting. It was their little memorial to Jasmine.

Desmond played in the yard with Rogue, but he seemed a little lost. He lay on the deck alone. Catalina too moved around the house in something of a daze. As much as she gave to Jasmine, she had always felt that she’d gotten more in return and she’d never felt that more powerfully than now. She loved her children more than anything, and she felt like Jasmine was her third child, but because of her limitations she was different. She needed more and that somehow made their relationship even deeper.

When Jasmine was there her life had purpose and meaning. She wanted to have purpose again.

She took to getting up very early, maybe 5:00 A.M. She liked it when the house was semi-dark and quiet. She could feel Jasmine during those times, or at least the remnants of her, the indelible impressions she’d left behind that became visible in the slanting light, like fingerprints on a glass table.

One morning the sky was gray and it was raining so hard that the sound of the drops hitting the roof filled the house. Out of nowhere Catalina heard a bird singing. The sound was so bright and clear she felt as if the bird were singing directly to her. As she listened the song reminded her of the one she used to sing: On the day that Jasmine was born / The angels sang a beautiful song…

She hadn’t thought about the song in weeks and calling it up now made her smile, made her remember how much Jasmine loved it and how happy it made her. Suddenly she became convinced that the bird was Jasmine. Just as the star in the sky over Croatia had been Jasmine reaching out to her, Jasmine was now singing to Catalina. The roles were reversed; Jasmine now offered a song to pull Catalina through the haze of her trauma.

Catalina decided to go to San Francisco to see some old friends. She’d begun to deal with her grief in bits and pieces, but she knew it would take months, even years to fully confront the pain inside her. The process really began that weekend, though, and before she left for home Catalina found herself at a tattoo parlor. She had one tattoo already, a butterfly she’d gotten after her grandmother died.

At that time that she’d felt that as long as she was alive, as long as she inhabited this body, her grandmother would be with her, literally tattooed onto her. She felt the same way about Jasmine. So she sat in the chair and winced as the artist etched into her skin the image of a bird about to take flight. The bird was looking up and its eyes burrowed into whoever viewed it, just like Jasmine’s used to do. The tattoo was the bird that had sung to her that sad morning. The bird that was Jasmine.

The past turned over and over in Catalina’s mind. She didn’t want to revisit it. She didn’t want to entertain the “could haves” or the “should haves.” Nothing lives forever. Accidents happen. Life happens. Blame and remorse are not factors in the equation. If not now, if not this way, Jasmine would have died some other way.

Catalina often talked about such things with Karen Reese. They were kindred spirits in this sense-they believed in the purpose and connectedness of things and in the power of their instincts to guide them. Shortly after the gag order on the Vick dogs was lifted, Reese met with a journalist who wanted to write about them. She mentioned that she’d received many calls but that this was the only one she’d returned. The journalist thanked her for choosing him, but Reese interjected, “No, no, I didn’t choose you. You were sent to us; you were sent to us for a reason.”

Likewise Catalina and Karen believed that Jasmine had been sent to them for a purpose. They felt as though Jasmine had a mission in this life and having achieved what she set out to do, she had been freed to move on. Jasmine was off to do something else, somewhere else, while the rest of us were left to follow our own paths.

This is Jasmine’s purpose.

This is the story she tells.