Oh yea since Curtis got away from your family so easily... the "little" darling can outschmart dumb thieves easily. I really think keeping the word out is your best bet. Also sidewalks are being used by people at certain times of the day and then they're pretty quiet. Around nineish tenish the sidewalks are pretty quiet and about the time a tortoise would be out and about. By then people are at their daily activities in school and working and wouldn't notice.😊I’m really thinking someone might’ve picked up Curtis and taken him with them or something. I’ve been searching all day to no avail, and my family has been looking every day after they get home. There’s been no info since the person who saw him on Monday, and they didn’t report seeing him until 2 days after. We also live next to a pretty rough neighborhood and a middle school is about a mile away. I’ve heard a lot from my sister who goes there, and a lot of the kids there are quite… something.
This morning some middle schooler called me to tell me they found my tortoise, he had a cracked shell, and they threw him into the lake. It sounded like an obvious prank call, so I hung up. After 4 hours of searching, I decided to text them and get more information just in case, and they described his color and size accurately, and said the crack was “a small crack on his ‘shell thing’”, which could describe one of his irregular scutes on the back of his shell. They said they put him in the pond at the apartment complex across the street from the middle school. They blocked me before I could get more information. I think they were lying and I’m pretty sure it would be really difficult for a middle schooler to carry a tortoise as large as Curtis all the way to that pond through a few gates, but it’s really worrying how accurately they described him. I went to the pond and it’s really dirty so I couldn’t see the bottom, and the sides are steep enough that if he wasn’t put in at a shallow spot, he might not have been able to get out. The school is a mile away, but it’s been 5 days since he was seen and it’s possible that he made it there.
I really don’t know where to go from here, besides putting more fliers out. I don’t know how so many people passed a tortoise walking along the sidewalk without reporting anything at all. It’s getting into the low 50s every night.