Family searching for lost dog who was struck by a car after escaping pet sitter

“I promised him nobody would ever hurt him again. I now must live with these thoughts of him in the wrong hands and the promise I made to him being broken.”

Fairfax County resident Rebecca DeVanney said in an interview with Royal Examiner that she and her daughter Taylor 15, are holding out hope that their dog, Chance, will be found after he bolted away from their dog sitter’s home on Nov. 5.

Chance is a blue pit bull who experienced a hard life, including abuse, before the Devanney family adopted him. While they were out of town for Taylor’s softball tournament on Nov. 5, Chance bolted when the pet-sitter opened the front door of her home. The sitter saw the dog get struck by a vehicle, though Chance continued running.

The family adopted Chance two years ago and are asking for the community’s help to locate him.

Even though Taylor had only played in the first game of the tournament, they hopped into their car and began the long drive home. Rebecca said the tracking collar that her dog wore was pinging on her mobile phone as she and her daughter drove home.

Within two hours of the collar’s ping activating and showing her dog’s movement, it stopped pinging, indicating the dog was in one spot, between Fairfax County Parkway and the Monument Dr exit in Fairfax, about a mile from the pet sitter’s home.

She had a friend go to the site where the dog should have been, but Chance was nowhere to be seen. His collar, however, was lying on the ground. It’s possible that Chance could have slipped out of the collar while a Good Samaritan was attempting to help the dog. Because of his difficult life before he was adopted by the DeVanney family, Chance is afraid of most people. He is less afraid, his mom said, if the stranger has a dog. The family hopes that someone was trying to help the injured dog, rather than removing a collar and taking off with the dog. Chance is micro-chipped, so if he turns up at a veterinarian’s office, he can be identified and returned to his family.

Though he has no experience as a fighting dog and is sweet-natured, Rebecca said she is aware that Chance’s breed is often used by people who run illegal dog-fighting operations. It troubles the family that someone might have taken the dog, intending to force him to fight.

Rebecca thinks someone stopped to check on the dog and decided to keep him, then removed the collar upon realizing it had a tracker. She says her daughter is distraught without Chance, as he was her emotional support dog.

Chance escaped from his pet sitter’s home when she opened her front door. Owner Rebecca DeVanney is offering a reward for the return of her pet.

The drive home was a frantic one for the mother-daughter duo; about 20 minutes away from where Chance’s collar had been found, Rebecca struck a deer that had darted onto the highway in front of her car. Sadly, the vehicle was totaled but its passengers escaped without injury.

A few hours after that 3:30 a.m. accident, the DeVanneys contacted a pet tracker to help them find Chance. The tracker picked up the dog’s scent and followed the trail across Fairfax County Parkway, where it abruptly ended at an apartment building.

The pit bull breed is banned in that apartment complex, though Rebecca says everyone in the neighborhood and the Reston area is aware that he is missing, and Chance’s owners have plastered missing posters all around the area.

It has been 11 days with no sighting of Chance, and Rebecca said she’s distraught for her daughter, who is having panic attacks as she deals with her dog’s missing status. “We both miss him so much and would do anything to get him back. This is an endless nightmare and it’s hard not to imagine the worst-case scenario,” Rebecca said.

Taylor DeVanney poses with her dog, Chance.

She explained that Chance was abused before they adopted him two years ago, and told Royal Examiner, “I promised him nobody would ever hurt him again. I now must live with these thoughts of him in the wrong hands and the promise I made to him being broken.”

There is a reward for Chance, and the family hopes that someone will spot him. “There have been zero sightings of him in the Reston area,” Rebecca said Wednesday morning in a telephone interview. She stressed that if Chance is seen, he will be with someone who is not his owner. Anyone who thinks they have seen him, she said, should take a picture and text it to her at 571-991-9173.