Officer Keith Smith said he was on patrol crossing the Broadway Bridge at around 12:30 a.m. when two women waved him down. Smith stopped and asked the women if they needed help, and they informed him a kitten was stuck between the edge of the bridge and a metal guardrail pillar.
Smith said he heard the kitten meowing and whining as he slowly approached the bridge’s edge to see what was going on.
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| Poor little guy does not look happy |
“It sounded like she was hurt or scared,” he said.
By carefully reaching down between the bridge and pillar, Smith was able to safely rescue the animal. He said he took the kitten back to the patrol car and sat it down to see why it was crying. A moment later, the cat bolted back toward the bridge to the 2-inch ledge where it had just been stuck.
“I’m an animal lover, so I was freaking out,” Smith said. “The women there were freaking out, too.”
Once again, Smith slowly approached the kitten. But as he reached down to rescue it, the cat turned around to face him, causing its back legs to slip off the ledge. Smith said it dug its claws into the concrete to stop from falling, but it couldn’t hang on and plummeted more than 30 feet into the water below.
“It was like slow motion watching her fall,” he said. “It was the saddest thing ever watching her splashing into the river.”
Smith shined his flashlight into the darkness below, but couldn’t see the kitten anywhere.
“We were thinking the worst,” he said. “That she’d drowned or given up. We thought that was going to be the end of it, sad as that was.”
Smith was still searching for the kitten from the bridge when a man named Alex Wise rode by on his bike and asked what was going on.
Smith told him he was searching for a cat, and Wise immediately volunteered to shimmy down to the river bank to the water to see if he could find the animal.
While he did that, Smith continued to search for the kitten with his flashlight.
Then, suddenly, he spotted the animal frantically trying to swim upstream. The kitten seemed to respond to the beam of light, so he moved it towards Wise. Sure enough, the cat swam toward the moving light.
“I’ve got a cat, and my cat goes crazy with a laser pointer,” Smith said. “I think it was the same kind of response from the kitten.”
Slowly but surely, the cat made its way toward the bank and closer to Wise. When the kitten was near enough, he reached out and grabbed the waterlogged animal, which was shaking from the cold.
“For a minute there, we didn’t think she was going to make it,” Smith said. “She was shivering so bad and her eyes went blank.”
Wise took off the bandana he was wearing around his head and wrapped the kitten in it. After a minute of warming it up, the cat was revived and began meowing again.
Smith placed the kitten in his squad car near the heat vent to keep it warm, but knew the animal needed attention. So he called dispatch to find the home address of Shelley Shircliff, the owner of a cat rescue shelter in town called the Scratching Post.
Smith drove over to the place and knocked on the door. It was after 1 a.m., but Shircliff answered the door. She told him to just keep the kitten warm and to feed it wet cat food, some of which she gave to Smith to take.
After returning to the bridge, Wise said he wanted to take the kitten home to care for it, but he didn’t have any cat food. So Smith drove him to a gas station and bought some to give to Wise.
Smith said they pulled up beside some EMTs from Dukes Memorial Hospital who happened to be in the parking lot, and they also handed over some warm towels to wrap the kitten in.
After that, Wise took the kitten home, and has now decided to keep it as a pet. Smith said Tuesday he talked to Wise, who informed him the cat was doing great.
He said the whole experience shows how a few concerned, caring people can do make a difference.
“It’s nice to know people care,” he said. “I couldn’t have done this without Alex.”
“There are different kinds of calls I feel differently about,” Smith said. “It’s definitely one of the more rewarding calls when you get to save a kitten. Saving any life is just a great feeling.”
(Kokomo Tribune - Aug 3, 2016)
