CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – Celine Cantuniar moved to the Clarksville area from Oklahoma on May 2 with her German shepherd, Kylo.
Cantuniar’s father was in town to help her get settled in, and on May 5, the father and daughter took Kylo to see a veterinarian for registration. When they got home a little after 4 p.m., Kylo jumped out of the car and took off.
Over the next three hours, Cantuniar found herself helped by a whole team of her new neighbors, and with the help from one kind couple, their drone and Kylo’s GPS tracking collar, Kylo would eventually be found.
Kylo gets hit
When Kylo jumped out of the car, he sprinted across the neighbors’ front lawns, making it to Tiny Town Road.
“I was chasing after him, kind of thinking that he would stop right before the street, so I wasn’t really too worried about it,” Cantuniar said. “I was jogging after him, calling his name, but he wouldn’t come to me and he just kept running.”
Her father was also running after Kylo.
“(Kylo) stopped right at the road, and it was rush hour, so there were a lot of cars going by on Tiny Town. All I remember after that is my dad screaming, and he was ahead of me at this point. He tried to get Kylo to come to him because Kylo slowly started to walk onto the road, and he got onto the road and then all these cars started honking and braking and swerving,” Cantuniar said.
Then Kylo was hit by a car.
“I don’t remember what happened, I kind of blacked out,” Cantuniar told Clarksville Now. She fell to the ground screaming.
Cars began stopping for her, and someone helped her onto the grass lining Tiny Town Road. She then looked up, and Kylo and her father had both disappeared. Two other women that had stopped to help saw Kylo run up a hill after being hit, and they drove Cantuniar to a church on the hill.
“Before I knew it, there were like seven or eight people looking for my dog,” Cantuniar said. “I don’t know how they knew or who they were, but they were asking what he looked like.”
Chance encounter
Cantuniar remembered she had just purchased a GPS tracking collar for Kylo. She opened the app and saw that he had run about a mile north toward Kentucky.
One of the folks who had stopped gave them a lift back to Cantuniar’s house, and they took her car to go find Kylo. When they got to where the tracking collar said Kylo was, they found a massive field bordering the Kentucky state line.
While Cantuniar ran into the field calling for Kylo, her father met Joshua Spencer and Kayla Connor, who had been out playing with remote-controlled cars. Cantuniar caught up to them.
“She was running hysterically, like crying and sobbing, we couldn’t even understand her,” Spencer said.
The couple joined the search, but the grass in the 3-mile-long field was 5 feet tall in some areas. After about 20 minutes, Spencer had an idea. He decided to run home and grab his drone.
“I was able to use the app she had from the collar, plug it into my GPS system on the drone, and pretty much pinpoint where he was,” Spencer said.
Using the drone, they pinpointed Kylo a mile and half into the field. But as they got closer, Kylo took off running again.
“We couldn’t catch him because you couldn’t run in this grass. It was so thick and my pants were all torn up,” Cantuniar said. “We were like swimming through this wheat field.”
Kylo ran about another half-mile, and then he got stuck.
Freeing Kylo
To avoid scaring Kylo again, Spencer told Cantuniar that Kylo was under the drone.
“There was a dried up creek almost like a ditch with broken branches and thorn bushes. Kylo was stuck, he had fallen into a hole and was tangled up in thorns,” Cantuniar said.
Kylo was unable to get out, so Cantuniar dove into the thorn bush to grab her dog by the collar. But then she then fell about 4 feet down into the muddy ravine and couldn’t get out with her dog.
Cantuniar’s father tried to free them both as well, but then he fell in.
“(Spencer) put the drone down, and he had to pull both of us out (of the hole),” Cantuniar said, with Spencer adding that it was “quite a task” getting Kylo, Cantuniar and her father out.
Spencer said they might have never found Kylo if it weren’t for the GPS tracking collar.
“The accuracy on that collar is quite amazing, and the fact I was able to pair it up with the drone, it was hand-in-hand. If it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t have been able to find him,” Spencer said.
The whole ordeal lasted about three hours from when Cantuniar and her father found the couple, to when they were able to get Kylo out.
“People everywhere around were trying to help me, and the fact that this couple, I’ve never met them before, but they walked with us for two hours in the middle of a wheat field and she was pregnant. It was just unbelievable,” Cantuniar said. “It was my third day in Clarksville, and obviously it was a very traumatic experience but I couldn’t believe the kindness that was around. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Kylo had internal bruising from being hit by the car and some scrapes, but he is expected to make a full recovery. Cantuniar said she has stayed in touch with Spencer and Connor.