'What a gift.' Greenwich cat missing 571 days finally reunited with family

Turtle the cat is getting plenty of love now that he's back home and after being gone for 571 days his family has a lot of lost time to make up for. It was so hard and I felt responsible. Kelly Moore says Turtle slipped out her front door in March of 2025. The rescue cat had been living with her in Greenwich for about nine months after her daughter Shelby adopted him from Tennessee. He definitely, like, is a bit of a Houdini cat to begin with, so when she told me he got outside, I was like, oh my god, like, how are we gonna get, how are we gonna get him back? Enter Rocco Autira, founder of Rocket Lost Pet Rescue. He set up trail cameras and tracked turtles' movements for weeks. We determined he was coming back to the house. We tried all different things to try to, like, lure him into the cage, but he wouldn't go through. Then, just like that, the sightings stopped and the trail went cold, But Autira never stopped checking for clues. A year and a half later, one appeared on social media. A cat that looked like Turtle had been found across the New York border in Mamaroneck. We scanned his microchip, and then I checked it, and it was him. And I was like, this is amazing. I was like, no way. Like, I called my mom, and she was like, what? Neighbors spent months seeing Turtle's face on lost signs, so it was only fitting the one on Kelly's front lawn got an update. Now what was once a reminder of a family's loss is a celebration. Be a good boy. Despite all that time on his own and somehow ending up six miles away, Turtle returned seemingly unchanged. It's like no time has passed, it's just, it's us. No one knows exactly where he spent those 571 days, but one thing's certain, home is where he belongs. just feel really grateful to the community around us and Rocco. It was quite an experience. We're still in shock but it's starting to really sink in of like, wow, you know, what a gift. In Greenwich, Marissa Alter, News 12.