For the last three years, you wouldn’t find Kenneth Colson without his spaniel mix, Myko.
The pair would ride the subway from their Far Rockaway beach house to Manhattan. They’d head to church together. He napped with the 54-year-old's cats. The little pup Colson called his “selfie buddy” even liked to sit perched on his shoulder.
“We were so attached," he said. “He was like my right arm.”
But the night Myko slipped out a cracked front door during last week's nor’easter and wound up at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station, that all changed.
That’s because Myko -- which Colson adopted from an acquaintance who said the pup had been rescued from an abusive home -- actually belonged to another family that lost him more than three years earlier.
“It’s been a roller coaster, all the way up and down to the bottom an up again,” he said.
Colson said it didn't take long to realize Myko had gotten away during the March 21 storm, and he immediately launched a frantic search for the dog. He posted flyers throughout the neighborhood, started a hashtag on Facebook to and posted Myko’s pictures to the dog-finding site FindShadow in hopes of finding the pooch.
Over the next few days, Myko was spotted around the neighborhood -- first at a grocery store nearby and then near their subway stop -- so Colson knew he he had made it through the storm.
Then, on March 23, he thought the break in the case that would reunite him with his dog came: a volunteer from FindShadow sent him a tweet from the NYPD’s Transit Bureau showing Myko in the arms of a police officer near the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station.
“I said, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s him! It’s him!,” Colson recalled.
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Colson said he tried to get in touch with the NYPD that night, but couldn’t get through. Then, the next day, a friend forwarded Colson what turned out to be a heartbreaking story published by NBC 4 New York: The NYPD told this outlet it had reunited the dog with its owner -- an owner that wasn't him.
“That’s impossible, I’m the owner,” he recalled saying.
By the time Colson could contact the officer who found him the following day, he began to unravel what had happened. Myko apparently had a microchip that Colson never about, and it returned an address for a family in Jamaica, Queens, that had since moved upstate. The officers, stunned that the dog had another owner, gave him contact information for the pup’s initial owner.
Colson said he worked up his nerve to call the owner earlier this week. She told him how her family had adopted the then-1-year-old Myko -- which they named Jack -- after their previous dog died. Their son, 10 years old at the time, left a gate open a year later and the dog slipped away not to be seen again until earlier this week.
“She had to wait three years to find out he was still alive,” he said. “It only took me three days... I’m just blessed that he’s alive and I didn’t have to live with that.”
The 54-year-old said that as he talked to the owner, he started to make connections to his own life. He himself ran away when he was a teen and was only reunited with his mother years later, when she tracked him down on Facebook. He said because of that he knew he couldn’t fight Myko's original owners for custody of the pup.
“I know what it means to be lost and found,” he said. “I understand and that’s why I did it. And I’m in so much pain.”
Colson said giving up Myko was the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He added that he hopes other pet owners will check to see if their animals are microchipped to avoid the heartache he has felt.
Still, he said he plans to visit his “selfie buddy” again soon.
”I know he’s at home now, he said. “He’s been restored, and it’s amazing.”
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Photo Credit: NYPD Transit bureau / Kenneth Colson
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