ELYRIA, Ohio (WJW) — An Ohio woman says she was devastated when her dog disappeared during severe storms in the area last week. She said she needed a miracle to bring her beloved pet back home.
The miracle began to unfold as Elyria resident Jim Warren was on his back patio watching the rain-swollen Black River rising on the ravine below. That is when he noticed something moving in the mud near the edge of the rapids.
Warren told Fox 8, "The more I looked, I saw it was a dog that was trapped in between the raging river and a fallen tree down there, and I thought, 'Oh man, that dog is in trouble.'"
The dog that Warren spotted was a 14-year-old boxer-pit bull mix named Sienna, who had gotten out of her owner's backyard during a break in the severe storms two days earlier, leaving 60-year-old Renee Morton, of Elyria, heartbroken.
"I recently lost my husband to ALS in April, and to lose her too would have been so hard," Morton said. "I worried that she might not come back, but in the back of my head, I still believed that God could bring her back if he wanted to."
Meanwhile, Warren decided to call the Lorain County Dog Warden. When Chief Deputy Nelson Delgado arrived, he immediately suspected the dog trapped in the mud in the ravine, was the same pet that Morton reported missing two days earlier.
Delgado told us, "I had never seen the river that high before, this is really crazy water running through it, saw the dog not moving, I call her, 'Sienna,' and then she kind of woke up."
Delgado said he knew he had to hurry because if Sienna was swept away in the currents of the river, she would have faced a certain death once she reached the nearby waterfalls at Cascade Park in Elyria.
Delgado used a fallen tree to edge his way down into the ravine. He says he fell a couple of times but kept going until he reached Sienna.
He then led the dog back up to the top of the bluff and safety.
"It made me feel good. It's alive and it's going back to the original owner, who I know loves that dog so much. So it was nice, it was a good feeling," Delgado said.
Delgado then drove to Morton's home and told her that he had something to return to her — her beloved Sienna.
Morton beamed as she told us, "It was just a miracle, just a total miracle."
Sienna is the third dog that Nelson Delgado has rescued along the Black River.
He said, "It was just the joy of doing my job, but at the same time, helping somebody, making them feel really happy about it."