From Fox42 KPTM
Employees at a Petsmart in Omaha, NE, were concerned when a man didn't pick up his pup after a grooming appointment. They followed their instincts and wound up saving the man's life.
The man had been getting his dog Lola groomed there since 2014 and he always picked her up.
Pet store employees tried calling him multiple times and knew something was wrong when they couldn't get ahold of him.
"He loves his dog. We all know that he loves his dog," says Kathryn Zawaideh, a pet stylist at the Petsmart.
"The check-in was normal. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He seemed normal health and he was talking normal, not like anybody who would actually want to abandon their pet."
Three whole days went by and there was still no sign of Lola's owner. They called the Nebraska Humane Society for help.
"We can wait until Monday but this call for some reason was a gut feeling something was awfully wrong and we needed to get to the owner as soon as possible," says Kisha Witherspoon, an animal control officer with the Nebraska Humane Society.
"I checked jails ... I even called missing persons to find out if there were any reports, just to see what might've happened, but I wasn't going to go home that weekend without finding out where this dog owner was at," adds Misty Binau, an animal control field investigator with the Nebraska Humane Society.
The Humane Society got in contact with the man's apartment complex. As it turns out that gut feeling was right on.
Binau says, "We went to knock on the door and we could hear him screaming from inside 'help! I need help!'"
The man had a medical emergency, and thankfully, was able to get the care he needed. Lola was reunited with the man's family members while he recovered.
"I'm just really grateful that this story had a happy ending," says Zawaideh.
