Pets & People

A Whole City Spent 20 Days Hunting for a Hardware-Store Cat. It Worked.

Francine, the beloved Lowe's cat, vanished into a truck bound across state lines. Thermal drones, 246 cameras, and 30,000 strangers brought her home.

By Marcus Webb, Products & Living Writer

October 8, 2025 · 6 min read

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The reunion happened at four in the morning, in a distribution warehouse 85 miles from home, when a small calico cat finally walked into a humane trap and started to cry. “She got in my arms,” one of the men who drove through the night to fetch her told the Washington Post, “and it just felt like pure joy.” After nearly three weeks missing across state lines, Francine, the resident cat of a Richmond, Virginia Lowe’s, was going back to work.

What makes Francine’s story worth telling isn’t just the happy ending. It’s what it took to get there, and what a runaway store cat revealed about the people around her. Somewhere between the thermal drones and the 30,000 strangers refreshing an Instagram account for sightings, a lost-cat search turned into a portrait of an entire community.

The store cat who runs the place

Francine has been a fixture at the West Broad Street Lowe’s since 2017, when she wandered in as a stray and the staff, predictably, fell for her instantly. She lives at the store now, fed and looked after by the employees, and she’s become enough of a draw that people make special trips just to see her. Store manager Mike Sida put her importance bluntly to the Washington Post: “She’s the first stop for probably 75 percent of our customers. She’s extremely friendly, and she loves people.”

So when Francine didn’t turn up for dinner one evening in mid-September, the staff knew something was off. And when a search of the store’s surveillance footage revealed what had happened, the scope of the problem got a lot bigger.

One wrong truck

As the store geared up for the holiday rush, the extra loading activity had disrupted Francine’s usual routine, and she’d gone looking for somewhere quieter. The cameras tracked her drifting through the appliance section and into the receiving department, where she made a fateful decision: she slipped into a truck. The truck then drove 85 miles south to a Lowe’s distribution center in Garysburg, and Francine bolted into a facility spanning 1.4 million square feet.

Finding one small cat in a warehouse that size is not a job for shaking a treat bag, though her coworkers tried that too. The search that followed was genuinely industrial. Lowe’s teamed up with North Hampton Animal Control to set humane traps and paper the area with flyers. They brought in thermal drones and thermal cameras to sweep the space for a heat signature. Reviewing footage meant combing through 246 cameras monitoring the distribution center. As the effort scaled up, staff added more cameras and seven more humane traps, and a Lowe’s maintenance associate, Robert Keeter, volunteered to check every trap through the night.

The search became a movement

The part that turned Francine’s disappearance into a local phenomenon was everyone who had no professional reason to care and cared anyway. A Richmond resident named Chas Nabi, with no connection to Lowe’s at all, started an Instagram account called wheresfrancine, urging the community to report any sighting. It became a command center: the account posted updates, coordinated on-the-ground searchers, and ran the logistics on spreadsheets, drawing more than 30,000 followers who treated a hardware-store cat like a missing neighbor. A local nonprofit, SOS Cats RVA, which runs trap-neuter-return work in the area, put up a $2,000 reward. It had become, in every sense, a citywide cat hunt.

The breaks came slowly. Francine surfaced on the distribution center’s cameras on October 4, and Sida drove 90 minutes out with associate Wayne Schneider and a bag of her favorite food, but she never appeared, and the pair drove back to Richmond empty-handed. Then, late that Sunday, she showed up on camera again, and this time she wandered into one of the traps. Schneider and Sida made the pre-dawn drive on Monday, October 6, to bring their coworker home.

Back to work, now with a tracker

Francine made her return to the West Broad Street Lowe’s on October 7, and the staff did it right. They rolled out a blue carpet for the homecoming and gathered to cheer her back in. This time she came home with an upgrade: a harness carrying her identifying information and an AirTag, so the next time curiosity gets the better of her, her coworkers can find her before she reaches another state.

To celebrate, the community threw “Francine Fest” at a local brewery, complete with live music, food trucks, and a pet-supply drive, with a share of proceeds going to SOS Cats RVA, the Richmond SPCA, and Richmond Animal Care and Control. Francine herself skipped the party. Per the wheresfrancine account, she was “enjoying her much needed beauty rest after a long trip,” which, after 20 days on the lam, she’d more than earned.

“We care for Francine so much, and we’re so thankful for everyone who helped, from our associates to animal control and our neighbors,” Sida said in a Lowe’s account of the rescue. “She’s more than our store cat, she’s part of our family.”

What Francine’s rescue can teach the rest of us

Strip away the drones and the viral Instagram account, and Francine came home for a few unglamorous reasons worth stealing for your own pets. Patience was one: the winning move wasn’t a dramatic capture but a humane trap, checked night after night, near her last confirmed sighting, because a frightened cat in a strange place hides and waits rather than running toward rescuers. Familiar scent helped draw her out. And the fix that will matter most next time is the cheapest one, the ID and AirTag now on her harness. Most lost pets don’t have a city forming a search party. The ones with visible ID and a working tracker are the ones who get found fast, no thermal drone required.

“The thing people skip is putting real, current ID on an indoor or working cat, because it feels unnecessary until the day it isn’t,” says Sasha Ford. “A collar tag plus a tracker turns a two-week nightmare into a two-hour errand. Francine got lucky and got famous. Most cats just need the tag.”