Toronto cat that disappeared in 2011 reunited with owner

Mary Lynn Simon was sitting at her desk at work when she received a very unexpected phone call.

“I could barely make sense of it,” Simon told CTV News Toronto. “He said, ‘Is Jinx missing?'”

Simon’s Abyssinian cat Jinx went missing in 2011.

“He was an indoor cat, and I had him since he was a kitten. And when we moved, he was two years old, and he discovered the great outdoors.”

Simon said Jinx had left home twice before. The first time, he got into a stranger’s car and went for a drive. The other time, he was brought back by a construction worker who had found the stray cat and contacted Simon through the tags on his collar.

For the past 13 years, Simon often wondered what had happened to Jinx and if he was even alive.

“It’s hard,” she said, “it’s sad.”

And then, last week, out of nowhere, she discovered that Jinx was not only alive and well, but had travelled some 12 miles in the past 13 years. Simon lived near Dufferin Street and Rogers Road when the cat disappeared, but he was found in Scarborough, near Victoria Park Avenue and Ellesmere Road.

“Did he have an owner? More than one owner?” Simon wondered. “Did he travel on foot? If only he could talk,” she said, laughing.

Jinx may not be able to talk, but the man who found him can. Louie Gjorgijevski was driving through Victoria Park last Tuesday when something caught his attention on the side of the road.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s a cat at a bus stop,'” Gjorgijevski told CTV News. “So I drove, I turned, and I came back.”

These photos show Jinx, a Toronto cat who disappeared in 2011 and was recently found in Scarborough.

Gjorgijevski noticed that the cat was not wearing a collar or a tag. He picked him up, put him in his car and drove him straight to the vet.

“If he has a microchip, we are happy,” Gjorgijevski said. “And yes, he had a microchip!”

There, the connection was made that Jinx had an owner. But when Gjorgijevski discovered that Jinx had been missing for over a decade, he said, “I got goosebumps… 12 years? Cat missing? Wow!”

But the discovery was bittersweet for Gjorgijevski. On the same day he found Jinx, he also lost his own cat, a formerly feral cat he adopted several months ago after his 19-year-old cat died in March. Gjorgijevski said he’s put up posters around his neighborhood, but he’s worried his neighbors will think his cat is a stray.

“That cat is not a stray,” he said. “That cat has an owner. I am the owner of that cat. The right thing (to do) is to please bring that cat back.”

As for Jinx, aside from some minor health issues, he seems to be in pretty good shape for a nearly 16-year-old cat. Now that he’s back in his original home, it’ll be a while before he’s introduced to the other cats that have been adopted since he left.

Simon is extremely grateful to Gjorgijevski, she says, and she hopes someone else will do the same for him and his cat.