- November 16, 2024
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At 6:30 in the morning on June 7, Sheila Lafleur was in her home when she received a text from her husband Paul, saying he was “busy.” A sense of anxiousness and relief fell through her body as she was just minutes away from finally being reunited with their dog, Harley, after 11 days of him being stranded in the middle of the woods.
“I was just bawling,” Lafleur said about when she found out their dog had been found. “It’s the kind of relief that just makes you cry… when you go through something terrible and something happens to make it all better; when you finally find out that it’s over and everything can get back to normal again.”
Harley went missing on May 28, when Sheila Lafleur was walking the dog down St. Joe’s Walkway near Linear Park. When a pedestrian came over to pet Harley, he backed up and slipped through his owners legs, running off into the trail and condos behind her.
“I was just trying to find some type of health exercise with the dog and I decided to take my dog on a walk for a few miles,” Lafleur said. “That one decision changed everything.”
Over the next five to six days, both Paul and Sheila did everything they could to try to find their lost dog. They went around the area trying to find Harley and printed out as many posters as they could to try to bring awareness to the community. But there was little to no to avail.
A couple of siting’s came forth, many in the Fairway condos, but the dog was still missing. Then, Sheila Lafleur discovered a webpage on Facebook, “Swip-Swap Palm Coast.”
“This changed everything,” she said. “I never understood why people were always talking about dogs if this was a shopping site, but come to find out, they use Swip-Swap to help try to find their missing dogs. So, I posted my story and it all started. The whole side of my computer was filled with shares of my post and people asking questions, trying to get insight just so they could help. Just by one post, everybody wanted to chip in and help.”
Over the next few days, the Lafleurs said people came by the bunches, looking and bringing in awareness to people about Harley by passing out flyers to others, and going to and around the St. Joe’s Walkway to see if anybody could catch a glimpse of their dog.
Many different sites were found where the dog was seen, and Lafleur would mark everywhere the dog had been spotted. She discovered that Harley was actually traveling in the same circular pattern around the area of the walkway.
“I also got a call from someone who was born and raised in Rhodesia,” Lafleur said. “Through their insight on how they have seen many dogs like ours, they said the dog is a tree line runner — they don’t go far into the woods.”
The dog owner was confident that it was only a matter of time until Harley was found.
The Lafleur family then hired pet private investigator Tammy Wozniak, of Ormond Beach, to try and bring the search to a close. Wozniak immediately came onto the scene and told Lafleur she was going to lay out random cameras with feeding stations around where Harley could be roaming.
“Then Tammy told us to stop the posts and having all the people come out and help,” Lafleur said. “At that point, I didn’t understand until she told me that all these people are posing as a threat to Harley. They are ripping through the trees shouting his name, and that frightens him because he doesn’t know who these people are. So that’s exactly what we did.”
A couple of days more had passed, and they were getting closer than they ever were to finding their lost dog. Harley was being spotted more than ever by the private investigator. However, Paul and Sheila Lafleur were coming down to the final day of help from Wozniak.
“She had other work to be done out of state for three months,” Sheila Lafleur said. “We were so close but if we hadn’t found Harley before she had left that might have been it. It was very discouraging.”
On the very last morning of private pet investigator Wozniak being able to assist the Lafleur family, Wozniak’s team cited Harley coming out of the woods into the open, but close to the roadway near Paul Lafleur’s car.
“I had to open the door of my truck and come out,” Paul Lafleur said. “That was the only way he would’ve approached me, and eventually, he crossed the street, came to me and I gave him the biggest hug imaginable.”
“Tammy called me thirty minutes later and was screaming ‘we got him, we got him,’” Sheila Lafleur said. “I was at home and I just replied saying, ‘yay!’”
“It was such a relief, I’m just so grateful to have our dog back where he belongs,” Sheila Lafleur said. “We truly missed him so much.”
