Last Updated on June 1, 2026 by admin
The anonymous tip said the smell was coming from the white house at the end of the cul-de-sac.
The Buckley Police Department logged the call on January 7, 2026, at 2:47 p.m. By the following morning, Pierce County Animal Control had a warrant. By Thursday afternoon, they had carried out 126 cats.
The first one out was a small gray longhair with one cloudy eye. The intake sheet says: INTAKE #1 / EST. 14 MO / GRAY LONGHAIR / RESPIRATORY / NAME: PEWTER.
The “name” line was filled in by a Pierce County Animal Control officer named Annika Sundstrom. She wrote it in the back of the van, in pencil, because she had run out of pens.
“You don’t keep the numbers,” Officer Sundstrom said later. “You give them a name on the way out the door. That’s the first thing that’s theirs.”
The home in Buckley had started with four cats two years prior. None had been spayed or neutered. Inside, when the warrant was served, litter was spread across the floor of every room. Food and water were present. The cats had been fed. They had not, in the language of the investigation, been kept.
Pewter rode out of the cul-de-sac in a borrowed Sherpa carrier on the floorboard of Officer Sundstrom’s truck.
By Friday, the Humane Society for Tacoma & Pierce County had taken thirty-eight cats. PAWS in Lynnwood took ten. The Cat Adoption Team in Sherwood took twelve. Buckley’s own small shelter took eleven. The rest went to fosters within forty-eight hours — a coordinated regional response that the volunteer coordinator at PAWS later called “the fastest placement of this size I’ve seen in twenty years.”
Pewter went into a foster home in Sumner. The foster’s name is Margot. She is sixty-one. She is a retired postal worker who has had nine cats over her lifetime and currently has zero.
“I told the coordinator I could take one,” Margot said. “Just one. I’m done with multiples.”
Pewter is one.
The eye is being treated. The respiratory infection cleared in two weeks. The vet thinks Pewter is around fourteen months old, possibly older. She is approximately five pounds. She purrs when she is being held. She purrs when she is not being held. The vet thinks she might just purr.
Margot put the photograph from Intake — the one Officer Sundstrom took in the back of the truck, with Pewter looking sideways at the lens — on her refrigerator. Above it, in magnetic letters: NUMBER ONE.
“That’s what she was,” Margot said. “First one out.”
The Buckley case is still under investigation as animal cruelty. The four original cats are believed to have been members of the same household for nearly two years before the litters began. None of the 126 had been microchipped. None had been to a veterinarian.
Of the 126, one has been formally adopted as of this writing: Pewter, by Margot, in Sumner, in a small house with a fenced yard and one very full refrigerator.
Annika Sundstrom kept a list of every name she wrote in pencil. She has thirty-seven of them committed to memory. She is hoping to attend each adoption when it happens.
One down. One hundred and twenty-five to go.