Endless Thread - Introducing NHPR's "The Final Days of Sgt. Tibbs"

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Endless Thread is thrilled to introduce you to a new podcast from our friends at NHPR’s Document team. That’s the team behind other great narrative shows like Bear Brook and The 13th Step. For the past six months, NHPR reporter Todd Bookman has been spending a lot of time thinking about… a cat. This cat’s name is Sergeant Tibbs – he’s 19. Tibbs goes missing… and lands in the center of a lot of human pain, confusion… and internet outrage. And as Todd investigated what happened here, he found a pretty profound story about what we owe our pets – and our neighbors. This week, we’re bringing you the first episode "Chicken Livers" of The Final Days of Sgt. Tibbs. We hope you enjoy! To hear the rest of the series, follow The Final Days of Sgt. Tibbs wherever you get podcasts. 

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Benny. Amo. And we're here to tell you about a new podcast from our friends at NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. Their document team has a new podcast, in addition to shows that they've made like Bear Brook and the 13th Step, which we love. And this one, you know, this one's a little different. It's a little different. For the past six months, NHPR reporter Todd Bookman has been spending a lot of time thinking about a cat.

This cat's name is Sergeant Tibbs. He's 19 years old. Which is old for a cat. That's old and cat years. Very old. Yeah. And Tibbs goes missing. And he ends up in the center of a lot of human pain and confusion and internet outrage.

Are you picking up what we're putting down, internet outrage? We know endless threaders love internet outrage. As Todd investigated what happened here, he found a pretty profound story, he says, about what we owe our pets and our neighbors. And so today we are bringing you the first part of this series, part one, of the final days of Sergeant Tibbs. And of course, if you get hooked in, if you get those cat claws synced in from this first episode, you can listen to the first episode. You can listen to the rest of the final days of Sergeant Tibbs wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Here's part one. Chicken livers.

Just a heads up before listening. There's explicit language throughout this series that might not be suitable for all ears. Also, if you're interested, we have photos, links, and more at nhpr.org slash Tibbs. I want to start by playing you a little sound. It's from a protest. Hey, what's that? I'll do my best to describe what's happening. But it's not easy.

It's a strange scene. I wasn't there, but I spoke in to people who were, and there's plenty of videos. The protest takes place in Manchester, New Hampshire. Bright sunny June day last summer. There are five people standing on a sidewalk, evenly spaced in front of a business. Maybe you think there's a lot to protest these days.

Maybe you don't. But this is not a protest you've seen on the news before. This protest, It's about someone's pet. If the internet didn't teach you anything, you don't fuck with people's cats. It gets weirder. A woman drives up, parks her car, gets out. Apparently, she's the target of the protest.

But rather than say anything to the protesters, she just stands near them, looking at them, twirling her keys. Six people on a sidewalk, five protesting one. It's 3 p.m. on a Sunday. Traffic streams by. If an alien came down to Earth, and this is what they saw, they'd be right to wonder. Is this typical human behavior? The cat at the center of all this is 19 years old, practically ancient,

a main coon with tiger striping and white whiskers, soft eyes. His name? Sergeant Tibbs, yeah, from 101 Dalmatians. And this is Rose Garcia. Rose is Tibbs' person. Not originally, though. The cat actually belonged to Rose's ex. I don't talk to the guy anymore.

He's, like, such a loser, but... When Rose and the loser split, she took two of his cats, Toby and Tibbs. And Toby's cool. He's got little brother energy. But Sergeant Tibbs, man, Rose and Tibbs are tight. She showed me some videos of him, hitching rides on her shoulders, snuggling up. Tibbs is a fluff ball, but also kind of a bad boy. He has a little snaggle, too. He's missing one of...

his little teethies because he broke his tooth on a rat. What? Yeah, I had to bring him to the freaking vet the next day because they were like, okay, we need to just to make sure that he didn't ingest anything because he brought home a freaking big-ass mouse. Did he kill it? Yeah, he killed it. I was like, thank you.

Their own love language. Rose is in her mid-30. works from home, keeps an eye on the pets. Tibbs is an indoor outdoor boy. He likes to circle his little corner of Manchester, New Hampshire, where Rose now lives with a new cat guy, Cody. Cody drives a tow truck, not a loser. And there have been times when Tibbs has disappeared for a night or two.

Rose would let him out, and he wouldn't come home right away. She leaves food out on the porch for him. She'll move his litter box outside. He always knows the way home. Tibbs comes back, no matter what, he comes back. But in early June, 24, Tibbs leaves. And this time, he does not come back. I look around the neighborhood, and so I look in all his spots,

and he's not there. I go down by the park, and he's not there. And I go down the block, and I look around there, and he's not there, and that's when I come to times that, like, you know, if he left, he did not want me to find him. him, like, he's gone, gone. Like, yeah, that's when I kind of realized that he's probably not going to come back. Rose spends days searching for Tibbs, and then starts to come to terms with it.

Remember, he's really old, 19. Just a week before Tibbs went missing, Rose had to rush him to the vet. He was having trouble breathing. She says the vet told her that Tibbs was not long for this world. He has arthritis, asthma. He's rapidly losing weight. He can't really groom himself. So Rose has been shaving mats out of his fur, the kind of elder care we all deserve. So when Tibbs goes missing, Rose starts to think he went off to die on his own the way some animals do. They'll hide at the end, even from the people they love.

But what Rose didn't know is that Tibbs was not dead, wasn't even lost. something that would turn out to be so much worse for Rose had happened. Tibbs had been found. My name is Todd Bookman. I'm a reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio, also a cat guy, and I've been investigating the final days of Sergeant Tibbs, which I have to say did not initially make sense to my editor. Generally, I'm covering news, like news news news in New Hampshire,

the governor, the legislature, court cases, that sort of thing. But Tibbs, Tibbs was impossible to let go. This story about a cat lost and a cat found. A story about what we owe our pets and what we owe our neighbors. A story about what happens when a dispute between two people, IRL, becomes fodder for the internet. And maybe what all this says or doesn't say about the way we relate to each other these days. Tibbs is not news news. But for a few chaotic days last summer, in Manchester, New Hampshire, Tibbs was the biggest story around.

And for whatever reason, I just wanted to figure out what happened. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. When it comes to the environment, it's easy to focus on doom and gloom, but that's not the whole story, especially when there are so many projects working towards bringing people in nature together. In this moment, optimism isn't naive. It's necessary. Follow nature is the solution wherever you listen to podcasts and discover stories of impact and possibility. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs.

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the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. The west side of Manchester is largely residential. Across a river from the city's downtown. A lot of multifamily units in a dense street grid, vinyl siding, working class.

And I found myself in an apartment here with two women, a mother-daughter pair. We can stand here. It's fine with me. Is everybody comfortable with that? We can all sit. The floors are clean. Should we sit? You want to sit on the floor? Sure. Debbie Ann Valenti invites me to sit down in an echoey apartment. Debbie is the landlord here. The unit's being renovated. There's no furniture. So we pop an uncomfortable squat. I don't want my feet anywhere you are. It's rude to have my feet in your face.

Debbie's daughter, Sabrina, is here too. because Sabrina is the one who actually first found tips. But Debbie does most of the talking. Yeah, if you go down the stairs we came in on, there's a back parking area. He was there. Sabrina and her friend were changing a car battery when this scraggly cat with some shaved patches

walks up behind them. Sabrina sends pictures of the cat to her mom, Debbie. And what did he look like? I'll show you pictures. He was bleeding a little bit. it looked like he'd been run over by car, but he wasn't crushed. Okay. If you touched that, if you touched his little body, he hurt like crazy.

Poor Tibbs. He seems to be in bad shape. Sabrina, Debbie's daughter, tries to give him some food and then rushes him to an emergency vet. The cat, the records did say that the cat didn't have any microchip. It wasn't a spade. There was no collar or anything on the cat when it was found. So there was no way of us tracing.

where it could have belonged. The vet wants to do a whole bunch of tests. I want to know if the cat doesn't look like it's going to make it. It honestly looked like it had cancer. I honestly thought it had cancer. Well, if it's got cancer, you can't let an animal carry on in pain, okay, and you can't let an animal stay in this condition. So I asked, or on speaker, is he going to live? Does he have cancer? Am I prologging agony? And the vet said he doesn't look like he's, he in pain. We don't know what's all wrong with him, but we and they did all the tests. Tibbs is anemic. The vet gives him fluids and an anti-nause drug.

Sabrina takes Tibbs home, not really sure what to do. Debbie and Sabrina are animal people, so they try to nurse him back to health, try to get him to eat something. But he noses away everything they offer, wet and dry food. What he did eat, chicken livers. chicken livers. Initially, it was chicken livers and rice, but sometimes he just wanted the livers.

He didn't want the rice. A few days go by, and Tibbs is eating a bit. He's lounging in sunny spots on the floor, becoming a little social with them. How would you describe his personality? Very gentle, very loved getting patted. You had to be careful when you patted him, though,

because he was all bone. So you couldn't just pat him normally. You had to, like, take two fingers and, you know, You couldn't pet him normally. When Debbie and Sabrina first found Tibbs, on June 7th, they say they called the Manchester Animal Shelter, but the shelter wasn't taking in any cats. They were full.

Sabrina posted a found cat listing on Petco's Love Lost website. It's like a missed connection page for lost animals, photos and all. I've seen the posting. Tibbs looks like hell. Scrony and half-shaved. The posting doesn't get any bites. Debbie and Sabrina also put up a sign in a business they own. I'm asking people, everybody I see, talk to in the neighborhood, because we work there, you know, telling people we found this cat.

And one lady says, I know that. She saw the picture. She goes, I know that cat. That cat, the lady says to Debbie, I think he lives in the house next door. Like right next door. Friday afternoon, June 28th, Debbie leaves work, walks the maybe 30 feet behind her building to the house next door. Rose's house. Debbie knocks on the door. And the knock on the door that Friday catches Rose off guard. She's still grieving what she thought was the death of Tibbs, who had disappeared from her life.

It had been three weeks since she'd last seen him. And now, suddenly, someone's at the door telling her he's still alive. Around 2 to 3 p.m., she comes knock on my door Friday. It tells me that she's had my cat for the last three weeks. And she's paid $6,000 in medical bills, and they don't know what's wrong with them. Did you know who she was? I did, yeah.

And, you know, I knew because she's the landlord from this place. Rose points to the building Debbie owns. She says she's seen her across the yard. But they don't formally meet till that Friday on Rose's porch. Rose remembers that she thanked Debbie, thanked her for taking care of Tibbs and for taking him to the vet. Debbie's memory of this conversation, though, quite different. She came out, she said it was her cats.

I said, well, what's wrong with your cat? Because I'm doing all these tests on your cats, and it would save your cats a lot of stress not to do them, and a lot of issues if we can figure out, and you know what's wrong with your cats, and we can get it back to its health. She said she had let the cat out to go and die on its own terms. The miscommunication of all miscommunications here.

Rose's fear was that Tibbs had gone to die on his own terms. But what Debbie hears is that Rose had abandoned a 19-year-old cat on a busy city street. And then, according to Rose, she asked me if I wanted my cat back. She was like, yeah, but if you want him back, you know, obviously I'll give him back because it's your cat, you know, it's your cat. And I was like, yeah, I do want him back. You know, he's got meds in here. He's got brothers in here. Thank you so much.

And she's like, okay, well, I do have antibiotics that I'm going to pick up for him later. So I'll drop him off right after. And I was like, okay. Okay. Rose is left with the impression that Debbie was going to come back, like that afternoon with the cat. Rose and Debbie trade some texts. Debbie actually sends photos of Tibbs. Rose writes back, I can't really express to you how much you helping him means to me. But Friday afternoon stretches into Friday evening. Debbie's headlights don't swing back into the driveway.

And Rose starts to get anxious. What's taking so long? Where's Debbie? where's Tibbs? A few more hours go by. Rose texts again, asking if Debbie had an estimate of what time she's coming. Debbie asks if she can call Rose later,

but she doesn't call. Finally, 9.56 p.m. Rose calls Debbie, and Debbie picks up. And then she said, yeah, you know, you're not going to, you shouldn't be waiting out there. You're not going to get this cap back. You know, from when we talked,

it sounds like you can. can't really afford this cat, and he was starving. And I was like, what the fuck are you talking? I was like, what are you talking? You said you were coming to my cat, my house, with my cat. Here I am thinking you're doing something nice. And she's like, I don't have to do anything for you. And that's when I hung up instantly because I was seeing red, and I couldn't even breathe.

Like, I was, like, choking. And that's when I started panicking. My whole world turned upside down. Sergeant Tibbs is still alive. Not dead, not lost, but alive. and with a neighbor. A neighbor who seems helpful at first, but now what? She won't give tips back?

Rose is losing it. What can she do? She decides to take to social media. She writes, This lady is stealing my cat. I'm going insane. Rose clicks the post button, a click that would have serious consequences

almost immediately, because over the next few days, things would spiral out of control. Online, comments start flooding in, hashtag justice for Tibbs is born. The internet has decided to weigh in. Was Sergeant Tibbs rescued or stolen? That's next time on part two of the final days of Sergeant Tibbs.

The final days of Sergeant Tibbs is a production of the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio. Okay, so that was part one of the final days of Sergeant Tibbs. And if you want to hear the next three episodes of this four-part series, again, right now, you can go and follow the final days of Sergeant Tibbs wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next week.