Reunited: Roberto, Princesa, and Sixteen Days in Miami

On a Tuesday morning in March, in a Miami Lakes gas-station parking lot, a chihuahua named Princesa was reunited with her owner, a man named Roberto, after sixteen days apart. The reunion was filmed by a Miami-Dade police officer's body camera; the footage is on the department's public release page; I have watched it more than once. Princesa is a tan smooth-coat chihuahua, approximately four years old, six pounds; Roberto is forty-seven, has been unhoused since 2021, and had been searching for the dog every day since she was taken from his arms while he slept on a bench at this same gas station.

This is the longer-form version of a chihuahua reunited with owner story that the local Miami news outlets covered in twenty seconds.

What the Dog Was to the Man

Roberto and Princesa had been together for three and a half years. Roberto had found her, by his account, as a young adult dog wandering near a strip-mall dumpster off LeJeune Road in 2022. He took her to a free clinic at the time, scanned her for a microchip, found nothing, and kept her. He named her Princesa because she carried herself, he said, like a person with somewhere to be. He fed her first, every meal, before he ate. She slept on his chest at the camp under the I-75 overpass, inside his jacket when it rained, inside the hood of his sweatshirt when it was cold.

The National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that between five and twenty-five percent of unhoused individuals in the United States are accompanied by an animal; the chihuahua and small-mixed-breed share is, in the volunteer-shelter data, disproportionately high. The sociological reasons, summarized in the 2018 work by Slatter and colleagues in Society and Animals, point to the small dog's portability, lower food cost, and the depth of the companionship the bond provides.

How Princesa Was Stolen, and How She Came Back

The theft was opportunistic. Roberto had fallen asleep on a bench outside the gas station; surveillance footage, later released, shows a man in a green hoodie walking past, pausing, lifting Princesa from inside Roberto's jacket, and walking out of the camera's frame in a span of perhaps eleven seconds. Roberto woke up at sunrise and the dog was gone.

He searched for sixteen days. He filed a report with Miami-Dade Animal Services on day three; he posted handwritten flyers, with a friend's phone number, on day four; he walked the route from the gas station to a shelter encampment on Northwest 27th every morning, asking. The clerk at the gas station, a man named Ernesto, kept a copy of the flyer behind the register.

On day sixteen, a woman named Karina, who worked the morning shift at a coffee shop two miles south, posted a photograph to a community Facebook group of a small tan chihuahua she had seen tied to a bicycle outside an apartment building near her shop. Ernesto saw the post that night, recognized the dog, called the number on the flyer.

The Reunion

The body-camera footage shows Roberto walking toward the patrol car as the officer is opening the carrier. Princesa registers his voice approximately a second before she sees him; she stands up in the carrier; she moves the seven feet of asphalt between them at a pace I would not have predicted for a six-pound dog who had been carried in a stranger's grocery bag for two and a half weeks. Roberto crouched. The dog walked into his hands. Roberto sat down on the curb because he could not, by his own account, remember if his legs were still under him.

The companion piece on the Penny rescue covers a different reunion at a different scale; the present case, Princesa and Roberto, is the one I keep returning to because of what the bond did not need rebuilding. Sixteen days apart, and the dog walked into the man's hands the same way she would have walked into them on day fifteen. The 2009 attachment-stability research by Topál and colleagues, in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, supports this: the canine bond, once formed, is durable across separations that are an order of magnitude longer than what most owners ever test.

Where They Are Now

Roberto and Princesa are living, as of last month, in a transitional housing program through Camillus House in central Miami, a partnership program that allows residents to bring small companion animals. Princesa has been microchipped, registered to the program's veterinary clinic, and updated to Roberto's case-worker phone number. Roberto is working part-time at a warehouse off Northwest 79th. Princesa, I am told, sleeps in his pillow.

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