Michelle Chang thought the wind sound echoing through the car was just her imagination as she drove south on the 5 freeway toward Irvine. Her weekend duffel bag was in the trunk, alternative music filled the air and Coco, a Snowshoe Siamese, was resting atop her kennel as she approached Disneyland.
Chang was 21 and almost home, excited to surprise her mother with Coco’s visit on Mother’s Day weekend in 2021. The UC Santa Barbara graduate had taken the family’s beloved 8-year-old feline up north so she could have company during the pandemic.
As the sound persisted, Chang said she pulled up on the power window buttons to try to make the noise stop. When she turned around and looked where Coco had been perched, the cat wasn’t there.
“I quickly pulled to the side of the freeway,” she said. “I couldn’t find her. I was in panic mode.”
Chang called her younger sister, Sarah, who helped search along the freeway in the dark. The sisters said they half expected to find the cat alive in the bushes and half expected to see her dead on the freeway.
After weeks of the family searching — driving along the freeway and along Manchester Avenue where Coco most likely went missing, posting signs and checking the county’s deceased animal site — the cat with striking blue eyes and white mitten feet, was nowhere to be found. Chang surmised Coco stepped on the window button and “flew out” of the car.
Kim Taylor, their mother, said each Mother’s Day has been bittersweet since. Her eccentric, smart, gentle cat who she taught to sit on command; who liked her ears scratched, but not her belly; and who hated people food, but loved kibble, was gone.
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For two years Mercedes and Oscar Chavez of Grants Pass, Oregon, saved up money to take a family trip to Disneyland for their son Gabriel’s 15th birthday. They brought along their three other children, ages 16, 13 and 7, and one of Gabriel’s friends.
After arriving July 1 for their week-long…
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