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When Rebecca and Carlo Belforte’s loud hollers fell on deaf ears, they knew something was amiss.

Dwight the cat never missed out on breakfast.

“It was really weird,” Carlo recalls. “We thought he must’ve slipped out.”

But then he pulled up footage from his surveillance camera and was shocked.

The 12-year-old cat didn’t slip away. He was taken. By a pizza delivery driver who’d just left a pie at the family’s Erindale Avenue home.

“We couldn’t believe what we saw,” Rebecca says.

The tape shows the male driver arrive at the Belforte’s east Hamilton home around 5:45 p.m. He steps out of the car emptyhanded, approaches the front door and tries to grab Dwight — an indoor cat who coyly found his way onto the porch — with no success. He returnes to the car, grabs the pizza, rings the doorbell and gives it to the Belfortes.

The man paces back to the car, flings the pizza warmer bag through the driver’s door and walks to the driveway before brazenly grabbing Dwight under his arm and driving off.

With proof in hand, Carlo drove to the Domino’s on Stone Church Road where he’d called in his order the night before. Surprisingly, he was met by the driver who delivered his pizza. According to Carlo, the driver was at first dismissive and said he didn’t take Dwight. Eventually, when pressed with video evidence, the driver budged.

“He said he took it because he thought the cat was a stray,” Carlo says. “It was literally unbelievable.”

The driver reportedly showed Carlo a text message that appeared to indicate he was looking to give the cat away or keep it for himself, “but his landlord was allergic,” Carlo says, “so he dropped him off instead” in the area of Gordon Drummond Avenue and Kennard Street, some nine-kilometres from Carlo’s place.

“I told him to take me to the exact spot he left him and he did. I followed him there,” Carlo says.

And so began what can only be described as a week-long frenzy.

The Stoney Creek neighbourhood where Dwight was abandoned became the epicentre of a search party that included more than 100 people, from members of a longstanding pet organization to strangers to sympathetic social media users.

There were all-nighters, endless drives, thermal cameras, cell cameras, night vision scopes and goggles, traps, treats, food, scans of residential backyards.

“We have some friends in the area and we even left stinky socks and clothes on their porches,” says Rebecca, “thinking he might catch a whiff and go there.”

On any given day during the search, you could find a dozen people pacing about the suburban neighbourhood playing “cat sounds” and audio clips of Rebecca calling Dwight’s name on big speakers they held over their heads, says Ken Price, a family friend and leader of the vast rescue operation.

“So many people, through the day and through the night,” adds Price, who founded Dream Team, a local rescue and recovery organization, in 2014. “It was an absolute frenzy.”

The promise of a reward surely helped. The Domino’s on Stone Church offered $500 to anyone that could find Dwight, which, in the case of a pet rescue operation, opens the floodgates to “people just in it for the money,” Price says. Domino’s also printed out flyers and sent on-shift employees to help with the search.

“It truly became our team’s mission to do whatever we could to help the Belfortes find and be reunited with Dwight,” franchise owner Werner Lomker told The Spectator, noting the responsible driver was fired and Domino’s Canada also donated $2,000 to Dream Team.

Yet with all this, Dwight remained missing. By Day Six of the search, Price met with an exhausted Rebecca and Carlo and told them Dwight was probably hiding because there were too many people around.

“We agreed Rebecca would post on Facebook to call off the search and tell people Dream Team was now handling it,” Price said.

The next morning, Dwight was spotted sunbathing in a backyard just steps from where he was released. A homeowner took out a bowl and put some food in it, the same luring tactic his parents use every morning to get him downstairs.

“Dwight being Dwight, he saw the food and came right over,” Rebecca says.

Aware of the wide-spanning search through extensive media coverage, the homeowner took Dwight to a local vet, who then called the Belfortes with news they’d waited a long seven days to hear.

Dwight — named after Dwight Schrute from ‘The Office’ because his meows bear a similar tone to Schrute’s incessant cries of “Michael!” — was safe and sound.

“Everybody who helped, the kindness of strangers, the community coming together, we will never be able to put into words what that meant,” Rebecca says.

“Words can’t describe our gratitude,” Carlo adds. “The people helped so much. It was just amazing.”

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