How a Newnan Chihuahua Found Three Lost Children

In August 2012, a four-pound chihuahua named Bell led her owner through a wooded patch outside Newnan, Georgia, and located three children who had been missing for several hours, according to reporting at the time by CBS Atlanta and Fox 8 News. The children, two sisters and a friend, walked out of the woods unhurt.

The case became a small national story over the following days. It also stands, more than a decade later, as one of the cleaner examples of a companion dog producing a measurable search-and-rescue outcome without any formal training. Bell was, by every account at the time, a neighborhood pet.

The walk

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The three children left a cul-de-sac in Newnan, a town of about 35,000 residents about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta, on the afternoon of August 1, 2012. Carlie Parga, age 8, her younger sister Lacey Parga, age 5, and Carlie's friend Victoria Baker were walking a family dog named Lucy on a short loop they had taken many times before.

"We tried to find our way out of the woods," Carlie Parga told CBS Atlanta in the on-camera interview that aired the following day. "We kept following paths and stuff and we got lost."

The walk turned when Lucy caught a scent and pulled the children off the trail and into the wooded land behind the cul-de-sac. The three girls followed the dog deeper than they had walked before, lost the trail, and could not find a path back. They walked for several hours, by their own later account, looking for any familiar ground.

The search

David Parga, the girls' father, returned to the house and noticed that the children had not come back from what should have been a thirty-minute walk. He searched the immediate cul-de-sac on foot, called for the children, and got no answer. His wife, Rebecca Parga, called the Coweta County Sheriff's Office.

"It's not like them to wander off," David Parga said in an interview with CBS Atlanta. "They were nowhere. I started running through the woods, calling at different spots, they are not answering, and I'm not hearing anything, so my wife called police."

Sheriff's deputies and Newnan fire personnel arrived inside the hour, according to the original local reporting. Neighbors organized informally on the street and split the search across the wooded land behind the homes. Among the neighbors who joined was Carvin Young, who lived across the street from the Parga family, and his chihuahua, Bell.

The track

Bell was, by the account Carvin Young gave to reporters that day, familiar with the Parga children. The chihuahua had spent time on the cul-de-sac, recognized the girls by scent, and recognized the family dog Lucy by scent. When Young walked into the woods with Bell off-leash, the chihuahua moved in a clear direction, did not stop, and did not double back.

"Bell sniffed them out," Young told CBS Atlanta. "She smelled them, her tail went to wagging and she kept running and running until she got to them. She started jumping up on me, and I knew we were close."

Young followed the chihuahua across the wooded patch and found the three children on the far side, opposite the entry point. The girls were tired, hungry, scratched in places, and unhurt. The total elapsed time from the initial 911 call to the recovery was, according to the Coweta County Sheriff's Office statement at the time, under two hours.

What Bell actually did, in plain terms

Scent-tracking work in formal search-and-rescue programs uses larger breeds, primarily bloodhounds, German shepherds, and Labrador retrievers, all of which are trained for months before they certify for live-find work. A four-pound chihuahua does not appear in any working-dog program in the United States. What Bell did, by the available account, was simpler and worked on a different mechanism.

Familiarity. Bell knew the children's scent. Bell knew the family dog's scent. The chihuahua's olfactory system, like every dog's, is built around the recognition of familiar individuals, and the work of recognizing a child she knew was a different cognitive task from the formal search-and-rescue task of finding a stranger. The chihuahua, in scientific terms, was running a recognition task, not a tracking task.

That distinction is not a knock on Bell. It is the reason the recovery happened so quickly.

How to help, in a similar case

For households with small children and access to wooded or unfenced land, the consensus guidance from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the National Association for Search and Rescue includes:

• Call 911 within 30 minutes of a child failing to return from an expected route. The window matters; the success rate of recovery drops measurably after the first two hours.
• Stay at the entry point with a phone and a description until first responders arrive. Do not pull the entire household into the woods at once.
• If a family dog was with the missing child, ask a neighbor with a calm, familiar dog to help canvas. Familiarity is the working variable. Formal training is not required for short-range recognition.
• Mark the entry point and the time. Search teams will work outward from a known starting position.

Where Bell is now

Carvin Young, the chihuahua's owner, gave a follow-up interview to Fox 8 News several days after the recovery and confirmed that Bell was a household pet with no training of any kind. The Parga family thanked Young and Bell publicly. Local coverage of Bell continued for a week and then, in the rhythm of small-town pet stories, quieted.

"She's a good dog," Young told Fox 8 News. "Everybody loves Bell."

For deeper reading on a different chihuahua news case, the Matilda case in Nova Scotia covers a small-dog story with a very different mechanism and a very different outcome.

Original reporting by CBS Atlanta and Fox 8 News, August 2012.