When the beloved resident cat of a Virginia Lowe’s disappeared, staff pulled out all the stops to find her

Richmond, Virginia — At a Lowe’s in Richmond, Virginia, store manager Mike Sida always had a favorite employee: Francine the cat.

“She wasn’t as friendly at the very beginning,” Sida told CBS News. “But after a little while, she found her place in a lot of people’s hearts, I guess you could say.”

Cats can do that. For nearly a decade, this former stray dog ​​was a constant presence in the gardening section. She would have become a local celebrity. Then one day, a few months ago, Francine disappeared.

“I just had a hunch she was gone,” said Wayne Schneider, a Lowe’s employee and Francine’s primary caretaker.

Schneider figured Francine must have wandered into a freight truck bound for a massive Lowe’s distribution center in Statesville, North Carolina, about 85 miles away. If so, it could have been anywhere in the distribution center, hidden in the stacks of pallets or in the rows of trucks.

“Maybe they opened the trailer and she came out,” Schneider said. “We would never find her.”

But Schneider said he had to try. So he enlisted the help of the distribution center’s warehouse managers, Preston Bullock and Taylor Taconet.

“As long as they were fighting within them, we were fighting to support them,” Bullock said.

“Our mission is to solve problems,” Taconet added. “And that’s exactly what we considered…We have a family member missing here, so we’re going to jump on it.”

They pulled out all the stops. They tried to lure Francine with Fancy Feast. They brought in a thermal drone to fly over the distribution center. They even searched it with a high-end 360-degree camera.

But they were out of luck — until surveillance video captured a grainy image of Francine in a freight truck parking area, and they were able to track her down and get her back.

“I could have cried, I’ll be honest,” Taconet said.

“I was so thrilled,” Schneider said. “Tears were streaming down my face, because we had found her.”

Sida and Schneider drove to the North Carolina distribution center, loaded Francine into a car and drove her back to Richmond, a triumphant return for their star employee.

Today, Francine is back to her old routine, wandering around the store and posing for customers.

“It’s good to see her back where she belongs,” Sida said.