Teen saves young cat from water in ditch

Evan Walters didn’t give a thought to the warnings about the dangers of drainage ditches.

When he heard the frantic feline cries and saw the cat clawing desperately at the concrete, he disregarded that the normally dry ditch was a raging torrent — a similar flash flood killed two boys his age in a ditch in 2005 — and that he didn’t know whose cat it was.

“I thought it would be a good thing to do,” the 13-yearold said. “It probably wouldn’t have survived.”

Copper owes at least one of his nine lives to Evan, a seventhgrader at Mann Middle School who got off the school bus Wednesday afternoon, heard the cat and pulled the struggling feline from the ditch.

Copper’s owner, Char Fritz, can’t stop thanking the teen she’d never even met.

“I know in my heart that if (Evan) didn’t save him, he’d be gone,” she said Saturday. “He was running out of steam.”

Copper, a 1-year-old who occasionally goes outside but never strays far, disappeared Monday, and Fritz worried a fox had run off with the cat.

They don’t know why Copper went into the ditch alongside their Van Teylingen Drive townhouse complex. The cement channel is deep but normally dry, though Wednesday it was swollen with runoff from rain and snow.

By the time Evan saw Copper, the cat had torn its claws out and rubbed it paws bloody trying to climb up the concrete.

Evan climbed a high fence, and, standing on a narrow ledge, scooped the bedraggled cat.

A passing driver stopped, and called the phone number on Copper’s collar.

Fritz was so ecstatic, she rushed Copper to a veterinarian and forgot to get Evan’s name. Copper was hungry, dehydrated and exhausted, but otherwise fine.

Fritz later went door-todoor in their complex, until she found Evan, then gave him a big kiss on the cheek, a gift certificate for a restaurant and some cash.

“It’s good to know there are still really, really good kids out there,” she said.