Woman’s missing stuffed Build-A-Bear cat with father’s ashes inside has been found - masslive.com

2022-04-22 22:23:59 By : Mr. Jin Yong

An image of the orange tabby cat stuffed animal Mary Mellinger Kirk is offering a $50 reward for. A vial of her father's ashes are inside.

Mary Mellinger Kirk’s tabby cat stuffed animal that held a vial of her father’s ashes and sparked a frantic search when it was accidentally donated to a West Springfield Savers is back home.

The Agawam woman posted to Facebook Wednesday that she received a package with no return address that held the Build-a-Bear cat that had the same serial number as her missing tabby cat.

“Thank you to whoever sent this,” she wrote in the post, “If you read this, please message me privately. If you are wanting to stay anonymous, I won’t release your identity to anyone, just please contact me privately.”

CHESHIRE IS Home! We received a package today. It was a poly bag addressed to me : Mary Mellinger Kirk (I only use my...

In a video she posted of the stuffed animal, she said the cat, named Chesire, does seem a little dirty and one of his legs seems broken.

She said she’ll be contacting Build-a-Bear to see what repair services they offer.

The cat was intact overall, Mellinger Kirk told MassLive and it had not been opened.

She had a tough time breaking the seam, but once she did she was able to feel the vial of her father’s ashes and pull the serial number out, she said.

At first she didn’t think it was the right stuffed animal because it was much dirtier than the last time she saw it, Mellinger Kirk said.

“I don’t want to admit I had lost hope, but I thought that if we were (going) to get it back, it would have been in the first couple weeks,” she told MassLive. It had been missing for 38 days.

Her house went on the market Wednesday, and she expected to move without Chesire, but then the package arrived later that day.

The person who sent the package is a mystery to Mellinger Kirk.

There was something else in the package with Chesire, which she didn’t identify, but said if someone comes forward for the reward they will be able to claim it if they tell her what it was.

Mellinger Kirk originally posted to Facebook on March 11 that the cat was in one of the boxes she donated to Savers, but it was never meant to be donated.

Her father Paul Mellinger gave her son the stuffed cat when he was a baby and they had the vial of ashes added after he died in March 2018.

She started off offering a $50 reward for the stuffed animal, but then increased the reward to $350 on March 21 after receiving donations from people in the community.

More than 4,000 people shared Mellinger Kirk’s post about the missing stuffed animal by March 21.

“I am humbled by the (community’s) response,” Mellinger Kirk told MassLive Thursday, “My biggest fear was that nobody would want to look for it because ‘it was just a stuffed animal,’ but that turned out to be so much more.”

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