Last Updated on September 7, 2026 by admin
Jadyn Sawyer had already parked. Eight hundred miles were behind her — New Jersey to Athens, Georgia, most of it interstate — and she was doing what everyone does at the end of a long drive, circling the car, pulling out bags. Then she saw the leg.
It was hanging out from behind the front driver’s side tire. Small. Still moving.
The kitten was roughly ten weeks old. He had been wedged into the undercarriage of her car since New Jersey, riding through more than eleven hours of highway noise, road heat and engine vibration, according to FOX 5 Atlanta. Nobody had any idea he was there.
He picked the warmest spot he could find
This is the part every cat owner already understands, even if they’ve never thought about it in a parking lot.
Cats look for small, dark, warm, enclosed spaces. A wheel well is all four at once. A car that has recently been running is warmer than the pavement, warmer than a porch, warmer than anywhere else a stray kitten in a New Jersey neighborhood is likely to find in a night.
He crawled up into a good hiding place. Then somebody started the engine and drove to another state.
Nobody could get him out
Sawyer called University of Georgia police, who came out to the campus lot. They tried. They could see him and they could not reach him — he was packed into the space behind the tire, in the part of a car that isn’t designed to be opened by hand.
Officers called in Cat Zip Alliance – Campus Cats, the all-volunteer group that has looked after the community cats living on and around UGA property since 2007. They couldn’t reach him either.
By now he was hot and he was panting. A panting cat is not a comfortable cat. The longer this went on, the worse the odds got.
So they stopped trying to pull the kitten out of the car and started taking the car apart instead.
They put the car on a lift and took the wheel off
The vehicle was driven to a nearby Tires Plus. Mechanics raised it on a lift, removed the front driver’s side tire, and opened up the space the kitten had spent eight hundred miles inside.
He came out alive.
No visible injuries. No broken bones. A ten-week-old kitten had ridden most of the length of the eastern seaboard jammed against a spinning wheel assembly, and he walked away from it — hot, panting, filthy, and completely intact. Put in air conditioning, he settled down within minutes.
The shop refused to charge anyone for the work.
His name is Jersey
They named him for where he got on.
Cat Zip Alliance took him into their care and placed him in a foster home, where he was scheduled to be neutered, microchipped and vaccinated against rabies on September 1. The wire-service version of the story ran nationally through Fox News in late August, and by then the adoption question had already answered itself.
Sawyer’s sister and her fiancé are taking him. They live in New Jersey.
Which means the kitten who stowed away for eight hundred miles is getting driven back up the exact same interstate he came down — this time in a carrier, in the back seat, with the air conditioning on.
The part that matters for your car
Jersey survived. Most cats in that position do not.
Engine bays and wheel wells are one of the more common ways outdoor and community cats are killed, and it isn’t only a winter problem — cats seek out those spaces year-round for shelter from rain, wind and heat, as Catster’s vet-reviewed guide on cats under car hoods explains. Once the engine turns over, the moving belt and fan do the damage in under a second.
The prevention takes about three seconds and it is almost embarrassingly low-tech.
Bang on the hood with the flat of your hand before you start the car. Knock twice, hard enough to make noise and vibration. If you have a second, glance at the wheel wells and under the vehicle.
Do it if you feed strays. Do it if you live near a colony. Do it if you park outside anywhere a cat could get to — which, for most people, is every day.
Jadyn Sawyer didn’t get the chance to knock. A kitten had already climbed in before she ever walked out to the car, and he stayed there for eleven hours and eight hundred miles, and the only reason anyone in Georgia found out was that one small leg slipped out from behind a tire at the end of the trip.
Do you check under your car before you start it? Tell us in the comments 👇