When one thinks of an animal in a cop car, one’s first thought may be a K9. Yet on one January night, the animal in the backseat of a Boone Police car was none other than a small stray kitten.
On the night of Jan. 15, Boone Police arrested someone for a DWI charge on Highway 105. According to a Facebook post made by Boone Police, a cat was present on the scene, following the officers, hiding under the car and crying. As officers arrested and put the impaired driver in the back of the cruiser, to their surprise, the cat jumped right in.
“Officers just couldn’t leave the sweet thing on the side of the road and in the cold, so one put it in their car and took it to dispatch to get warmed up!” the post reads.
Administrative Sergeant Dennis O’Neal said it was “kind of comical,” referring to the situation and the name given to the cat: Dewey, a play on the acronym DUI.
Dewey was checked for a microchip and ID but none were found. The Facebook post encouraged people to call if the cat belonged to anyone. Soon, Dewey went up for adoption.
O’Neal said his daughter wanted to adopt the cat, but he said they didn’t need one at the time. He said the kitten was “probably living the life of luxury” with the person who adopted him: a Watauga County medic.
Emma Ward is a full-time EMS and rescue worker for Johnson County, Tennessee, and a part-time Watauga County medic who grew up in Boone and attended App State. She said she had been looking into getting a cat from the Watauga Humane Society when one of her friends made a joke about the cat distribution system and how if she waited then she would not have trouble choosing a cat.
The cat distribution system goes as follows: when the time is right and you are ready, the universe will present you with a cat. Most of the time, it’s a stray.
“He was like, ‘I’m telling you, it’s the cat distribution system,’ and I was like ‘That’s not a real thing,’” Ward said.
Spoiler alert: it became a real thing for her.
“It was literally the next day that they posted Dewey online,” Ward said.
Ward said after a shift at Watauga Medical Center, she arrived at dispatch where Dewey was playing with a radio antenna when she laid eyes on him for the first time. Once she picked him up and he started purring, the rest was history.
Although she was already looking to adopt a cat, she expected to have more time before actually having one in her possession. Because of this, the supplies she had ordered a week prior had not arrived yet.
“Now I have a cat before any of the stuff that I had planned on getting came,” Ward said.
Dispatch gave Dewey a small box, blanket and food which Ward carried into her car to take him back to her home.
“We made it like five minutes into the drive and he jumped out and crawled up in a ball in my lap and slept on my lap the whole way home,” Ward said.
Ward recalls the story of when Boone Police first found Dewey during the DWI arrest and said a middle name was given by police to match his founding even further, a name which she kept. His full name? Dewey Modelo.
Ward said first responders receive calls all the time and can never expect what a call will actually lead to.
“It can either be really bad or it could just be a routine normal thing, but you don’t expect to come home with an animal,” Ward said. “And so for somebody to get to go and find something as sweet as Dewey and then bring him back and then me get to take him home is just completely out of the blue.”
Studies show working in emergency services can be a mentally taxing job. Working in multiple departments of emergency services daily for two to three years, Ward said coming home to Dewey is “fulfilling” as he is always happy, never grumpy and is always excited to see her, whether she’s been gone for 24 hours or one hour.
“It’s just like a nice break from everything that you do at work and everything you have to do in general with emergency services and all the people and feeling burnt out and stuff,” Ward said. “It’s just so nice to come home and have something that’s always happy.”
From getting into the cop car to opening his treat bags, which Ward said is his only naughty quality, Dewey has “learned that nothing is off limits.”