"We Have Your Boy": How Forty Came Home to Philadelphia After Eleven Years

Jourdyn Koviack was 16 years old, a high school junior working at a local tanning salon, when she scraped together $200 and bought a two-month-old pit bull puppy on a street corner in Frankford. He was white with a smattering of black spots and soulful eyes, and she carried him home on the bus tucked inside her sweatshirt. She named him Forty. "To me, at 16 years old, he was my entire world," she said. Her family had always had pets, but Forty was the first that felt like hers.

For three years, it was bliss. She carried him around in her purse as a puppy; when she got her first car, Forty always rode shotgun. He loved pup cups and hot dogs. She made him an Instagram page and photographed everything — Forty dressed as a rock star for Halloween, Forty in a party hat on his first birthday. "Forty filled every void I ever had," she said. He taught her, she added, "tolerance and patience and responsibility and love."

Then, in the spring of 2015, it all came apart. Koviack had just come back from the grocery store when she realized Forty was gone. He'd been in the backyard of the family's Mayfair home along with another family dog, and now the gate stood open — though she was certain she'd closed it. Both dogs had vanished.

She did everything a person can do. She hung hundreds of posters across the city — "LOST DOG!" and "EXTREMELY FRIENDLY!" — and promised a reward. She flooded Facebook with pleas. People shared her posts again and again, and strangers sent photos of dogs they were sure were Forty. But each one had the wrong markings or the wrong color eyes. "People kept saying to me, 'Well, lights can be deceiving,'" she recalled. "But I knew Forty's markings from a mile away." The family eventually found their other missing dog listed for sale on Craigslist, and with the help of police they got that one back. Forty, though, they never found.

Years slipped by. A pandemic came and went. The Eagles won a Super Bowl, then another. Koviack grew up. She got married, moved two hours out of Philadelphia to Luzerne County, and got another pit bull she named King. But she never stopped talking about Forty. She kept his Instagram page alive and would sometimes scroll back through old Facebook posts, hunting for a lead that never came. "Everything would remind me of him," she said. "Driving by a dog with a spot on his eye, hot dogs, pit bulls."

She had microchipped Forty shortly after getting him. And then, about two months before everything changed — more than a decade after he'd disappeared — it occurred to her to call the microchip company one more time. There was no luck; there never had been. By now, Forty would have been 13, and she knew, in her heart, that he had likely passed away long ago. Still, on a whim, she updated her contact information with the chip registry anyway. Just in case.

That small, almost fatalistic gesture turned out to be everything.

One Saturday night, a white dog with black spots turned up on a Philadelphia street. He had cozied up to a little girl playing outside, and her family had brought him in, fed him, and called animal control. When an officer arrived to take the dog to the shelter run by ACCT Philly — the Animal Care & Control Team of Philadelphia — he discovered the dog was microchipped. A check of the online registry produced a phone number belonging to a woman in Luzerne County.

Koviack, now 30, was leaving a trampoline park with her family when her phone rang. When the man said he was an animal control officer, her first thought was that King had gotten loose. But then he said something about Forty. "We have your boy," he told her. She figured it was a prank. "Send me pictures," she said. "I don't believe you." He obliged. The moment the photos loaded, she screamed: "That's my f— dog!"

She wanted to drive down that very night, but was told to wait until morning. She spent a sleepless night reading about how to care for an older dog — the best foods, the most comfortable beds. The next morning she and her husband and kids made the trek to the Philadelphia shelter, where they were led into a small room, everyone repeating, "I can't believe it." Then a dog sauntered in. His black spots were now flecked with gray, and he seemed a little confused. But there was no question. It was Forty.

Where he had spent the missing decade remains a mystery. ACCT Philly said he'd been well cared for recently — clean, with trimmed nails. "There's no way to be certain," said executive director Sarah Barnett, though she suspected "someone probably stole him, realized he was neutered, and then gave him away." What is certain is the ending. Forty now follows Koviack around the house and sleeps beside her son, who was just a month old when the dog disappeared. "It's like a part of my childhood came back," she said. "I keep looking over at the couch just to make sure he's still there."