Brownie’s back! Sick boy in Paterson reunited with his missing dog

PATERSON — Adrianne Trastoy wasn’t trying to be a hero when she bent down to comfort a dirty pooch she saw shaking and whimpering beneath a parked car near her home in Paterson on Tuesday evening.

“He was really scared, so I started petting him and then I picked him up,” Trastoy said.

The act of kindness by the 22-year-old Montclair State University student set in motion a series of events that resulted late Wednesday afternoon in the happy reunion between a little boy with muscular dystrophy and his dog, named Brownie, who had been missing for four days.

“It’s a miracle,” said Jazmine Crespo, the boy’s mother. “It’s such a blessing.”

As Crespo spoke, Brownie bounced around on top of her 7-year-old son, Jacob Rodriguez, as the two buddies resumed playing with each other as if they had never been apart.

“I’m happy that he got his dog back,” Trastoy said as she watched Brownie and Jacob. “I have a dog, and I wouldn’t want to go through that.”

Trastoy hadn’t heard anything about the $500 reward that had been offered for the Shih Tzu’s return, nor had she seen the stories in the newspapers and on television about the missing dog. “I didn’t know it was such a big deal,” she said.

Trastoy said she read a little about the situation through social media, and on Tuesday she went to Crespo’s home to see if the dog she found was the one that belonged to Jacob. But no one answered, she said. A neighbor checked the dog and said it didn’t look like Brownie, she added.

So the young woman took the dog back to her home, about a block away, gave the pooch a shower and shared her bed with him for the night. “He didn’t want to sleep on the floor,” she said.

She said she made arrangements to drop the dog at the Paterson animal pound on Wednesday, after her classes at Montclair State and after her shift at the Dunkin' Donuts on Route 20. “I work there to put myself through college,” she said.

It turns out Trastoy already knew Paterson Animal Control Officer John DeCando, because he is a regular customer at the coffee shop. On his way home from work on Wednesday, DeCando stopped by the Dunkin' Donuts and the two of them went to get the dog from Trastoy’s home.

At first, DeCando said he didn’t recognize the dog. The shampoo had changed his fur, and he looked different from the picture that Crespo provided, he said. But the pooch’s tail matched Crespo’s description, he added. “She said it looked like a lion’s tail,” DeCando said.

There was no doubt it was the right dog after they took it to Crespo’s home. “You should have seen his face light up,” DeCando said of Jacob’s reaction.