A beloved pet tortoise is reunited with its family weeks after disappearing in a Mississippi tornado

Myrtle, a cherished pet tortoise, has been reunited with its family in Mississippi weeks after disappearing during a deadly tornado outbreak in March.

“He’s been through a lot,” said Myrtle’s grateful owner, Tiffany Emanuel. “I know that he knows just as much as I do that every step of the way I’m going to be there helping him, caring for him, making sure he gets, you know, the help that he needs.”

The Emanuel family fled their home in the rural Kokomo area as a tornado hit on March 15. They returned to find two pine trees had fallen on top of their tortoise’s backyard home.

Myrtle was missing.

Weeks later, a neighbor found the injured tortoise. He was taken to the Central Mississippi Turtle Rescue for medical treatment on April 4.

“The lady who found the tortoise called me and she said she had run into the owners,” said Christy Milbourne, the organization’s founder and codirector. “She said, ‘I think they’re going to be calling you.’ So, I was excited, and then the owners did call and say, ‘Yeah, that’s my tortoise.’”

Emanuel is now nursing Myrtle back to health.

“It feels good to kind of have some kind of happy out of so much sad and grief and loss,” Emanuel said.