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

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. When Joe Missoula got the Celtics job, Steve Paliuka sat up until 1:00 in the morning typing him 25 things about leadership. Dr. Sharon Turbin asks what came first on the list. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Ally here with cash when you need it, like when your stylist just did the most. Fresh cut and zero cash. Don't be in a... Ally has 75,000 fee-free ATMs nationwide, so you're never without cash. Ally Bank member FDIC.

• 0:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, it's Benny.

• 0:39Amory Sivertson?

  A-Mo. 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.

• 0:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 1:07Amory Sivertson?

  This cat's name is Sergeant Tibbs. He's 19 years old.

• 1:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is old for a cat. That's old in cat years, very old.

• 1:15Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. And Tibbs goes missing, and he ends up in the center of a lot of human pain and confusion and internet outrage.

• 1:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm, 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.

• 1:51Amory Sivertson?

  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 rest of The Final Days of Sergeant Tibbs wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, here's part one. Chicken livers.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  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/tibs.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  I want to start by playing you a little sound. It's from a protest.

• 2:45Speaker 05

  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've spoken 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 is about someone's pet.

• 3:16Speaker 06

  If the internet didn't teach you anything, you don't fuck with people's cats.

• 3:24Speaker 05

  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 3:00 PM on a Sunday. Traffic streams by.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  If an alien came down to Earth, and this is what they saw, they'd be right to wonder, is this typical human behavior?

• 4:06Speaker 05

  The cat at the center of all this is 19 years old, practically ancient. A Maine Coon with tiger stripes and white whiskers, soft eyes. His name?

• 4:17Speaker 07

  Sergeant Tibbs, yeah, from 101 Dalmatians.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  And this is Rose Garcia. Rose is Tibbs' person. Not originally, though. The cat actually belonged to Rose's ex.

• 4:29Speaker 07

  I don't talk to the guy anymore. He's like such a loser, but...

• 4:33Speaker 05

  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 fluffball, but also kind of a bad boy.

• 4:54Speaker 07

  He has a little snaggletooth. He's missing one of his little teethies because he broke his tooth on a rat.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  What?

• 5:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, I had to bring him to the frickin 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 frickin big ass mouse.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  And he killed it?

• 5:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, he killed it. I was like, thank you.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  Their own love language.

• 5:25Speaker 05

  Rose is in her mid-30s, 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.

• 5:57Speaker 07

  Tibbs comes back. No matter what, he comes back.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  But in early June 2024, Tibbs leaves. And this time, he does not come back.

• 6:08Speaker 07

  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 terms that like,

• 6:24Speaker 07

  you know, if he left, he did not want me to find him. Like, he's gone, gone. Like, yeah, that's when I kind of realized that

• 6:34Speaker 07

  he's probably not going to come back.

• 6:37Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  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 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

• 8:29Speaker 05

  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.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. There's a part of high performance that drives you, shapes you, and pulls at you, too. Rarely spoken, almost never examined, that's the quiet tension. Coming up, psychologist and executive coach Dr. Sharon Turbin with Steve Paliuka on what separates the leaders people follow from the ones they don't. Stay with us for a preview. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Ally here with cash when you need it, like when your stylist just did the most. Fresh cut and zero cash. Don't be in awe. Ally has 75,000 fee-free ATMs nationwide, so you're never without cash. Ally Bank member FDIC.

• 9:41Speaker 08

  At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

• 9:48Speaker 09

  But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing, or-

• 9:53Speaker 08

  Politics.

• 9:53Speaker 09

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• 9:57Speaker 08

  Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not-science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

• 10:04Speaker 09

  And hopefully, make you see the world anew.

• 10:06Speaker 08

  Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

• 10:09Speaker 09

  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  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?

• 10:32Speaker 10

  We can all sit. The floors are clean. Shall we sit?

• 10:35Speaker 05

  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 squad.

• 10:48Speaker 10

  No, no, no, I don't want my feet anywhere you are. It's rude to have my feet in your face, but I can't bend my legs.

• 10:55Speaker 05

  Debbie's daughter Sabrina is here, too, because Sabrina is the one who actually first found tips, but Debbie does most of the talking.

• 11:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, if you go down the stairs we came in on, there's a back parking area, he was there.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  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?

• 11:21Speaker 10

  Um, I'll show you pictures. A very, he was bleeding a little bit. Sh, uh, it looked like he'd been run over by a car, but he wasn't crushed. Okay. If you touched that, if you touched his little body, he hurt like crazy.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  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.

• 11:44Speaker 11

  The cat, the records did say that the cat didn't have any microchip. It wasn't spayed. 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.

• 11:57Speaker 10

  The vet wants to do a whole bunch of tests. I want to know if the, 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. Okay. 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, uh, all on speaker, is he going to live? Does he have cancer? Am I pronouncing agony? And the vet said, he's, he doesn't look like he's in pain. We don't know what's all wrong with him, but we, and they did all the tests.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  Tibbs is anemic. The vet gives him fluids and an anti-nausea 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.

• 12:51Speaker 10

  What he did eat, chicken livers. Chicken livers. Initially, he, it was chicken livers and rice, but sometimes he just wanted the livers. He didn't want the rice.

• 13:03Speaker 05

  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.

• 13:10Speaker 12

  How would you describe his personality?

• 13:12Speaker 10

  Very gentle, very loved getting patted. You had to be careful when you patted him though, because he was, he was all bone. So you couldn't just pat him normally. You had to like take two fingers and, and, you know, rub him. You couldn't pat him normally.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  When Debbie and Sabrina first found Tibbs on June 7th, they say they called the Manchester Animal Shelter. 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, scrawny and half shaved. The posting doesn't get any bites. Debbie and Sabrina also put up a sign in a business they own.

• 13:57Speaker 10

  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.

• 14:09Speaker 05

  That cat, the lady says to Debbie, I think he lives in the house next door. Like, right next door.

• 14:21Speaker 05

  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.

• 14:48Speaker 07

  Around 2:00 to 3:00 PM, she comes knock on my door Friday, tells me that she has, 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 him.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  Did you know who she was?

• 15:01Speaker 07

  I did, yeah. And, you know, I knew because she's the landlord from this place.

• 15:06Speaker 05

  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, for taking him to the vet. Debbie's memory of this conversation, though, quite different.

• 15:25Speaker 10

  She came out, she said it was her cat. So I said, well, what's wrong with your cat? Because I'm doing all these tests on your cat and it would save your cat 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 cat, 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.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  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.

• 16:05Speaker 07

  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. Uh, thank you so much." And she's like, "Okay, well, I do have antibiotics that I'm gonna pick up for him later, so I'll drop him off right after." And I was like, "Okay."

• 16:25Speaker 05

  Okay. Rose is left with the impression that Debbie was gonna 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

• 17:07Speaker 05

  call. Finally, 9:56 PM, Rose calls Debbie, and Debbie picks up.

• 17:14Speaker 07

  And then she said, "Um, yeah, you know, you're not gonna, you shouldn't be waiting out there. You're not gonna get this cat back, you know. From when we talked, it sounded like you can't really afford this cat." And he was starving, and I was like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" And I was like, "What are you talking, you said you were coming to my cat, my house with my cat. Here I am, thinking and 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 choking, like. And that's when I started panicking. My whole world turned upside down.

• 17:53Speaker 05

  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 Tibbs back? Rose is losing it. What can she do?

• 18:09Speaker 05

  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. #JusticeForTibbs 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.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  The Final Days of Sergeant Tibbs is a production of the Document Team at New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 18:57Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so that was part one of The Final Days of Sergeant Tibbs.

• 19:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  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. See you next week.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Cherben, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston on the thing the best leaders do that most don't.

• 19:37Speaker 12

  The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target, on the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, "I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there." Not many coaches do that, but that's why the players, you know, love Joe, and that's why, another reason, he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn.

• 20:19Speaker 12

  There are many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 20:26Speaker 13

  And really, what an array of leaders because leadership is both the same and different depending on the environment that you're in.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Listen for more of the quiet tension wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Ally here with cash when you need it. Like when your stylist just did the most. Fresh cut and zero cash. Don't be in awe. Ally has 75,000 fee-free ATMs nationwide, so you're never without cash. Ally Bank Member FDIC.