"Our Baby Is Back!": Gizmo Comes Home After Nine Years

In February 2015, Judith Monarrez's life was quieter and her dog was young. Gizmo, her little chihuahua mix, was only two years old, one of three dogs she shared with her family at their Las Vegas home. Then, on February 3, everything went wrong at once. Gizmo and the family's two other dogs got out. A neighbor managed to wrangle the other two, but Gizmo was another story. According to what Monarrez was told, a woman scooped him up and said she would check him for a microchip. She never did — and Gizmo simply vanished into the vastness of the Las Vegas valley.

Monarrez, then 28 and living with her parents, refused to accept that he was gone for good. She threw herself into the search with a determination that would last nearly a decade. She plastered flyers around the city. She called veterinarians. She started a Facebook group dedicated to bringing Gizmo home and posted to social media year after year. But as the seasons changed and the years stacked up — one, then five, then eight — the silence grew heavier. Somewhere in the back of her mind, hope began to feel like a luxury she could barely afford. And yet she never fully let it go.

Then came the night of July 17, 2024. An email landed in Monarrez's inbox, and as she read it, her legs gave out beneath her. She sank to her kitchen floor and wept. After nine long years, someone had found Gizmo. The now 11-year-old dog had been brought to a local veterinary clinic — the Animal Emergency Center serving Las Vegas and Henderson — by a woman who had come across him. Staff there did the one thing that would change everything: they scanned him for a microchip. The chip was still there, still registered, and it pointed directly back to Judith Monarrez.

She could hardly believe it and called the clinic to be sure. "When I called, they were like, 'Yep, we have him. It's him,'" she recalled. Remarkably, Gizmo had been found only about ten miles from the very home he had escaped from nearly a decade earlier. Within hours of receiving that email, Monarrez was in her car, driving across town to see with her own eyes the dog she had spent nine years searching for.

The moment of reunion erased any lingering doubt. "When I looked in his eyes, I knew immediately it was Gizmo," she said. And Gizmo knew her too. As soon as she said his name, the old dog tilted his head and fixed his gaze on her, unable to look away. It was, she said simply, "a miracle." On Facebook, she shared the words her family had waited nine years to say: "Our baby is back!"

The joy was tempered by the sobering reality of Gizmo's condition. Nine years on the outside — or wherever he had been — had taken a heavy toll. He arrived with multiple infections, dental disease, and a body that told the story of a hard life. Veterinarians suspected old fractures had left him with a permanent head tilt and legs that bent when he walked. He had dry eye syndrome layered on top of an eye infection. Monarrez was, in her words, "a little shocked at his condition," and admitted, "I cannot fathom what he went through." To help cover the extensive care he would need, the family started a GoFundMe, and the community responded generously.

Gizmo's personality began to return in small, hopeful increments. In a detail that moved everyone who heard it, when the frail chihuahua was reunited with one of the family's other dogs after all those years apart, the two shared a single sniff and instantly remembered each other — and were soon cuddling together in their crate as though no time had passed at all. Within days, his eyes were responding to antibiotics and, as Monarrez put it, "he's doing much better."

Her reunion carried an added layer of significance: it came just weeks before a new Las Vegas ordinance requiring pet owners to microchip their cats and dogs took effect. Monarrez's own experience had become the perfect argument for it. "Hindsight is 20/20," she reflected. "I'm so glad I registered his microchip." Now her focus is singular — to nurse Gizmo back to health and, as she put it, to shower him "with all the love that we were holding onto for all those years."