Let's hear it for the MICROCHIP!!

Astro comes home after 9 years

PORT ST. LUCIE — A lot has happened to the Geary family since their German shepherd, Astro, went missing from their Port St. Lucie home nine years ago. They moved three times and ended up in Louisville, Ky.

The family members were amazed when they got a call from an animal control officer about three weeks ago in Tennessee telling them they’d found Astro.

“It’s still a real shock that he is actually here,” said Linda Geary about having their dog back. “We are getting use to the fact that we don’t know where he has been or who had him, but he’s our dog and has always been our dog.”

About nine years earlier, Linda’s husband Dennis and his stepdaughter went to the Treasure Coast Humane Society in Palm City to adopt a dog, Dennis Geary said.

That day, they left with Astro – a black and off-white German shepherd that weighed about 80 pounds.

A month later, Astro was missing. The Geary family posted signs and called shelters but never found the dog. After a year, they adopted a new dog.

Then, on Jan. 29, an animal control officer in Montgomery County, Tenn., picked up Astro after complaints of a German shepherd running loose in a neighborhood in St. Bethlehem, Tenn.

Animal control officers tracked down Dennis Geary through a microchip implanted when he adopted the dog from the Treasure Coast Humane Society. Officers went online to locate Dennis Geary and found two names with Florida connections to call, one at the Louisville address and the other a Tennessee farmer who said the dog wasn’t his.

The officers left a message on the Gearys’ answering machine the first week in February.

Once Dennis Geary called animal control back and hung up the phone, he looked at his wife, picked up the phone, called animal control back and said, “I’m going to bring him (Astro) home.”

That following weekend, Dennis Geary and his stepson made the three-hour drive to Tennessee.

“I didn’t know what to think,” he said. “I was still in shock. I was excited but apprehensive because I didn’t think he was going to remember me and I didn’t know how he was going to respond.”

When the two members of the Geary family arrived at the shelter and staff brought out Astro, the reunion was sweet and wet.

“They brought him out and he just sat down and licked both me and my oldest stepson,” he said. “He was like, where have you been?”

It has been three weeks now since the Gearys have had Astro home.

“It’s just amazing,” Linda Geary said.

Throughout the nine years Dennis Geary said he never forgot Astro. He still has the dog’s picture in his wallet from when he first adopted him nine years ago in Port St. Lucie.