When Drew the Australian shepherd reunited with his family on Friday — two days after a man stole their Subaru Legacy while the dog was in the back seat — he’d had quite the adventure. But it was not as long of an adventure as his owners originally thought.
According to the Subaru’s odometer, it (and the pup) had traveled 282 miles. A trek, certainly, but Drew didn’t travel nearly as far and wide as his owner, Gail Krueger, and her boyfriend, John Prevost, had first believed. Prevost had erroneously compared the car’s mileage tracker to that of the previous month, and thought that the car thief had driven more than 1,200 miles in two days.
The error made it onto Krueger’s Facebook post about her found dog, as well as into The Columbian’s story about the reunion that appeared in Sunday’s edition.
Prevost corrected the mistake in an email to The Columbian on Sunday.
“Sending you this correction, after my discovery, is just the right thing to do,” Prevost wrote.
Krueger’s car was stolen Wednesday afternoon while she was hanging flyers around Vancouver’s Harney Heights neighborhood. In an ironic twist, her own dog was stolen while she was trying to track down the owners of another small dog she’d found wandering the previous evening.
She’d just hopped out of her car to hang a flyer on the corner of 16th Street and Grand Avenue when a sedan pulled up behind her. A man jumped out and got into her car, then both vehicles took off. Drew was in his crate in the back seat.
They don’t know where, exactly, the thieves took the dog. A post on the Facebook page of a coffee shack in Boring, Ore., appears to show the Subaru in security video footage connected to a robbery, though any occupants of the car, human or canine, aren’t visible.
On Friday, an anonymous tipster reported seeing the car parked outside a local taproom. Vancouver police officers arrived to find Drew in the back seat — safe, sound and very sleepy.
“Gail & I now talk about ‘Drew’s BIG adventure!’ We are so humbled by all the support that we received; so much good out there that really helps offset the incident,” Prevost wrote.
