Updated at 11:58 a.m. on Tuesday, April 2
Good news: Lily found her family. Here's the latest.
Our original story continues below.
Genee Mireles had just boarded an RTD bus in southwest Denver last week when she was greeted by an unusual sight: A dog exploring the cabin.
"I was just taking my kids to school that morning — we take the bus regularly — and the kids were greeted by the dog," she remembered. "She just came and licked my son."
At first, she thought the rottweiler mix might belong to a man sitting by the window.
"(But) I realized he wasn't holding onto her," Mireles told us. "She was wandering the bus."
So she asked the guy: where did this puppy come from?
She'd followed him on, he told her, at Florida Avenue and Federal Boulevard stop. He had no idea where she came from.
Mireles spent the rest of her ride worrying about her busmate. Should she derail her whole day to make sure she found her way home?
"I'm thinking, 'I've got to get to work, I can't take her, I can't keep her,'" she said. "I was telling the kids, 'Hey, you may be late for school, I'm sorry!'"
It turns out her name is Lily. She's now in an Adams County shelter.
Mireles said the bus driver called their supervisor, and someone from RTD eventually met them all at the 38th Avenue stop.
RTD then called another bus to take its passengers further, Mireles said, allowing Lily to stay onboard the original bus as they figured out what to do.
"We took the bus all the way up there. Then once we got off, the poor thing, she tried to follow us off. Nobody else wanted to hold onto her," she said. "She was nice and fat, so you knew she was well-fed. She was nice and friendly, she knew how to shake. She's somebody's dog."
RTD staffers decided to bring Lily to Adams County's Riverdale Animal Shelter, where she's currently listed alongside more than 60 other lost dogs, 20 lost cats, a lost turtle named River and a chicken drifter named Paul.
Stephanie Wilde, Riverdale's executive director, told us last week that Lily is microchipped, but that the phone number logged in the chip's data was out of service.
While Riverdale usually allows lost pets to stay with them for a week before they become shelter property and relisted for adoption, they extended that allowance for Lily so they could try mailing a letter to the address listed in the microchip metadata to find her owners.
This week, Riverdale community liaison Tabatha Gormley said their efforts hadn't gotten far.
"We've been trying to trace ownership through that chip, and we haven't had much luck," she told us. "She would officially become shelter property on Monday."
Shelters have dealt with a lot of stories like this recently, though they don't usually involve a bus.
Gormley told us Riverdale has seen a lot of abandoned animals in the last few years. Denver's animal shelter recently reported a spike in those cases, too, and even hired a social worker to try to avoid taking on too many unowned pets.
"Like shelters across the nation are seeing, we're seeing an increase," she said. "We do correlate that with the housing and financial crisis."
That's not to say that Lily was abandoned. If her owners do attempt to claim her after Monday, Gormley said, they may still be able to get her before she finds a new home.
While Riverdale is seeing more intakes than usual, adoptions still happen quickly. Most dogs are adopted seven days after they're listed on the shelter website.
And though Mireles' part in this story is over, she said she's still thinking about the pup she met riding the bus alone.
"I just hope she finds her family," she said.
