A 14-year-old Dachshund was reunited with his legally blind owner who prayed daily for the service pup’s safe return after he was stolen from their Illinois home in early June.
Bam Bam, whose disappearance went viral online as enraged dog lovers spread the word to help find him, was dropped off at Chicago’s 16th District police station by an unidentified man and woman around 8 p.m. Tuesday night — more than two months after the pouch was taken.
After being identified as the viral pup through his microchip, Bam Bam was finally returned to his owner, Angel Santiago, a 58-year-old man who is legally blind due to glaucoma.
Upon their reunion, Santiago held the senior wiener dog close to his chest, peppering the dog’s snout with long-awaited kisses.
Bam Bam was snatched from Santiago’s yard on June 5, leaving the legally blind man to navigate a world he struggled to see without his little helper leading the way.
Santiago told PETA organizers that he heard two men bust into his yard and scoop up a frantic Bam Bam. He said he tried to intervene the best he could, but that the pair absconded with his beloved pup.
When Santiago wasn’t on the street handing out flyers and shouting for his missing dog, he was praying “every day and night” for Bam Bam, he told the Chicago Tribune.
“No matter how many times I fall…I always get up,” Santiago told the outlet.
Despite his disability, the dedicated dog dad would walk up to seven miles a day in desperate search of Bam Bam.
All his efforts soon paid off as other horrified dog owners took to the internet to help spread the word.
“To the people who took that blind man’s dog out of his backyard, I literally hope you never have a good night’s sleep ever again. The fact that you went into a blind man’s yard and took his best pal, his best companion, his service dog for the last 14 years, you literally deserve to never have a moment of peace,” one TikTok user said through near-tears in a video with more than 800,000 views.
Santiago told the Tribune that he even received calls offering support from other countries like Spain and New Zealand.
PETA was planning on posting billboards in Chicago to help with the search, but Bam Bam was dropped off at the police station mere days before they were set to go up. Because everything was already planned and paid for, the same billboards will still be plastered throughout Chicago, but will have a label clarifying that the dog was already rescued.
It’s unclear if the pair that dropped Bam Bam off at the police station played a role in his disappearance.
Detectives are still investigating. No one has been taken into custody.
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