When Kyla Primas brought home her puppy in 2024, he would run around her yard in New Jersey or relax with her as she worked from home.
“He would follow me everywhere I went,” Primas said of her Bernedoodle named Kash.
In fall 2025, Primas moved to Baltimore to be with her partner, and got a job as a third-grade teacher. The couple moved in together near Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Kash became more skittish.
“He heard nothing but sirens and people yelling and trucks going by. He was not used to that at all,” Primas said. “That made him really nervous.”
One day in January, Primas went out to pick up dinner. While she was gone, her partner, Morgan Hall, took out the trash, and Kash dashed out the door.
Primas and Hall spent most of the night looking for Kash. The next day Hall called out from work to make posters and keep looking.
Then that weekend a major snowstorm hit.
“I spent all day crying,” Primas said.
She didn’t know how Kash would survive on his own. She kept looking, but also started hoping that someone had taken him in so he would be safe and warm.
“I prayed that he was with a family that needed him more than me,” Primas said.
For seven months, Primas heard nothing about Kash. But then in late August, she saw a post in a Patterson Park neighborhood Facebook group that a shaggy dog had been spotted nearby.
“Anyone know this guy?” the poster asked. “Seems friendly and playful but runs away if you get close. He has a collar but just can’t catch him.”
“I’m like, ‘That’s my dog,’” Primas said.
Primas responded immediately and raced over to the corner where Kash had been spotted, but he was gone.
With fresh hope, she went home and made a new batch of posters using the more recent photo. Kash’s fur had grown long and looked matted. Once again Primas and Hall taped posters across the neighborhood and wrote messages in Facebook groups.
Soon it felt like Kash was everywhere.
“Every day after that, I get a message that somebody saw him,” Primas said, explaining that people were sending her photos and doorbell camera footage from across the neighborhood.
But any time Kash was approached, he would run away.
Then at about 1 a.m. on Labor Day, Ron Lee Ward and Kat Bailey took their dogs out for a walk. Ward wanted to show Bailey the frogs that come out at night in Patterson Park.
They never made it to the frogs though, because on their way there, they spotted Kash.
The dog followed them from a distance, getting on his hind legs and barking to seemingly get their attention. But he would run away when they tried to approach him.
“He was just very scared and asking for help,” Ward said.
The couple realized it was the lost dog they had been seeing on posters.
Using their own dogs, Ward and Bailey slowly lured Kash into a dog park. Finally around 3 a.m., they managed to get close enough to get a leash on him and bring him home. They messaged Primas and gave Kash food and water. They then stayed up the rest of the night cutting back months worth of matted fur, they said.
“He was such a good boy while I chopped away at his smelly armor for over 3 hours,” Ward wrote in a Facebook post. “I wasn’t done, but Kash was done, so I stopped to give him a break from clipping.”
That was when Ward saw that Primas had responded to his message, and they arranged to meet and return Kash later Monday morning.
Hall took a video of Primas and Kash’s reunion. Ward and Bailey said the shy dog who had spent the night with them transformed the moment Kash saw Primas.
“Then I could see the playful dog he really is,” Ward said. “That he probably hasn’t been able to be.”
Primas tried to offer the couple a reward or buy them a meal, but they refused.
“I’m familiar with that heartache of having a pet disappear,” Bailey said.
When she first moved to Maryland, one of her cats got loose while someone was watching them. After months of searching, a stranger found and returned the cat, and Bailey and Ward said they wanted to pay it forward.
Primas and Hall brought Kash to the vet and learned his health was good apart from some fleas and being a bit skinny. Then they took him to the groomer and had the rest of his matted fur shaved off.
Primas does not know where Kash was for those months he was missing, though she suspects he may have been taken in by someone or hiding out somewhere.
“I’m thinking maybe he found an abandoned house to go live in and was there for months,” Primas said. “I’m always asking him, ‘Where were you?’”
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The post Her dog had been missing for seven months. Then his photo appeared online. appeared first on Washington Post.
