By Rick Rojas
He evaded death at a shelter that needed to make room for more dogs. He was shot at — a veterinarian plucked pieces of ammunition from his flesh. He dodged a train, scampered across an interstate highway and survived on cat food left out for strays.
He is about 3 years old, weighs 17 pounds and has coarse, cloudy fur. And for several months, he had much of New Orleans looking for him. With each foiled capture or implausible escape, his fame grew and so did his reputation. He became an almost mythical figure, too savvy and swift to contain.
His saga has inspired tattoos, murals and Mardi Gras floats. Some have held him up as a renegade, choosing freedom over the comforts of domestic life. Scrim, as someone along the way named him, is also a living, panting embodiment of the spirit of New Orleans: He, like the city, kept on going despite it all.
But for the small band of volunteers who bonded over months of searching for him, Scrim is simply a little dog who has been through a lot of trauma in his short life.
“There were one of two things that could happen,” said David W. Brown, a journalist in New Orleans whose free time became consumed by the chase. The odds of a positive outcome, Brown said, grew more faint each day that Scrim stayed on the loose.
In November 2023, an overcrowded shelter in a nearby parish sent Michelle Cheramie a list of dogs it planned to euthanize. On that list was Scrim, who looked like a West Highland white terrier mix.
Nearly 20 years ago, in the brutal months after Hurricane Katrina, a passion for animals led Cheramie to start Zeus’ Place, named after her own beloved dog. Her plan was to provide grooming, boarding and day care that would help support a rescue operation.
By the time Cheramie took in Scrim, Zeus’ Place was helping stem a crisis of a different sort: Dogs that had been adopted during the pandemic were flooding back into packed shelters.
Scrim arrived frozen by fear, carrying the baggage of his old life. All she knew was that he had been battered and neglected.
He stayed with volunteers for a while, recovering. In April, someone wanted to adopt him and brought him home for the trial week that Zeus’ requires.
On the first night, he bolted.
Hours turned to days of searching for Scrim; days became months.
Flyers were posted and appeals were made on social media. Scrim was purportedly spotted all over, some calls more credible than others.
A group of volunteers coalesced around Cheramie. Brown got looped in after reporting a sighting that turned out not to be Scrim. Bonnie Goodson started riding her bike around her neighborhood at night to look for him. Tammy Murray and Barbara Burger were easily recruited.
“You bring me out one time,” said Burger, a court reporter and an acquaintance of Cheramie, “and I’m on a mission.”
The team worked the grid of streets in the Mid-City neighborhood like patrol officers, Brown said. They crawled under countless houses. They hurried to check out reports of dead dogs, hoping they were not Scrim.
He kept running, always just beyond their grasp.
Cheramie set up a target in her backyard made from a tracing of a dog they rescued that looked just like Scrim. She practiced and practiced with a tranquilizer gun.
On Oct. 23, a tipster reported spotting him around a lot where a limousine company parks its vehicles.
Cheramie got there, positioned the dart gun and fired.
“Perfect shot,” she said.
He ran for seven minutes before he started wobbling in circles. Cheramie and Goodson swooped in.
“You’re safe,” Cheramie told him.
He had broken teeth. A chunk of his ear was gone. He had been shot with a pellet gun.
After leaving the animal hospital, he went to what was supposed to be his new home, settling in over a few weeks. When his new caretaker needed to go away, Cheramie temporarily took him in.
On Nov. 15, while she was out, Scrim went upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom, where her cats lounge on beds facing the sunlight. The window was open but screened. He chewed and clawed through the mesh. He jumped onto the roof of her front porch, and then he was gone.
The leap only intensified the legend.
This time, Scrim covered a lot more territory. He passed by the Superdome. He was spotted hanging around the giraffes at Audubon Zoo. He somehow made it all the way to Harahan, a far-flung suburb. A crowdsourced map online filled with sightings.
For the search team, Scrim’s second escape meant more tips to check out and more crawling under houses. He snubbed the traps they set with beef and Popeyes fried chicken.
The long nights in random corners of the city reminded them that Scrim was not the only creature lost in New Orleans. The team rescued dozens of other dogs and cats. They checked in and offered help, too, to distressed people living on the streets.
“It opened my eyes,” Burger said.
The longer the search went on, the more the prospect of finding him alive seemed like a miracle.
He was loose during the eruption of fireworks on New Year’s Eve, and attention turned away from Scrim after a deadly attack on Bourbon Street the next day enveloped the city in grief and fear. He also was on his own during the commotion that came with hosting the Super Bowl and a blizzard that shut down the city, dumping more snow than New Orleans had seen in decades.
On Tuesday, Cheramie got a text message with a photo. Scrim was squeezed into a trap that had been set for feral cats.
Two days later, there he was, chilling in a little bed at Cheramie’s house. He was perfectly calm, even as people cycled through to bear witness. He was like a newborn baby everyone wanted to see and hold.
He accepted the scratches, toys and some of the treats visitors brought. Cheramie’s dog, 90 pounds of curiosity and cuddles named Scooby-Doo, sulked like an attention-starved big brother.
The traps had been dismantled. Cheramie was looking forward to disconnecting the second cellphone she had carried for responding to tips. When the search team assembled at her house Thursday night, it was to eat pizza and share stories.
Cheramie still obsessively checked her doors, windows and gates. Burger said she would like to believe Scrim was ready for a different life. Maybe he was. But he might also be plotting, waiting for that perfect opportunity to run.
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