Police found a missing cat named Number Five this week, five days after he was reportedly abducted from the San Francisco Flower Market in Potrero Hill.
For the past three years, Number Five has lived inside Grace Nursery, a vendor in the wholesale flower mall. He’s the fifth pet of florist Grace Su, his name nodding to the Chinese tradition of birth order nicknames.
The round-faced gray cat is something of a celebrity at the market, she said.
“He’s a really cute guy,” Su said. “Everybody knows him. Some days he walks down to other vendors, sitting on people’s counters, looking at them. He thinks he’s in charge of the whole market, supervising to see that people work.”
But on the morning of May 9 — in the midst of the market’s pre-Mother’s Day rush — Number Five vanished. Security footage reviewed by the Chronicle showed two women and one man stopping to pet Number Five several times while shopping. They can then be seen scooping him up, carrying him through the parking lot and loading him into the backseat of a black Honda.
Number Five usually wore a tracking collar, but his captors appeared to remove it, Su said. When a patron found the discarded collar and returned it, she “realized he was stolen right away.”
She said she struggled to sleep, imagining Number Five being abandoned to live as a stray.
Su filed a police report, and officers came to the market to review security footage, running the Honda’s license plate. Meanwhile, Number Five’s admirers were searching for any trace of the beloved cat online. On Thursday, a friend sent Su a post on Instagram that showed Number Five perched atop a forklift in Emeryville, 10 miles from home across the Bay Bridge.
On Thursday afternoon, police found Number Five at a warehouse near Emeryville and returned him to San Francisco, Su said. No arrests were made, the department said in a statement. No further information about the recovery was immediately available Friday night.
Number Five was unharmed, Su said, although a little skinnier than when he left home last week. He’s also been jumpy, shying away when she tries to hug him. “Maybe he just needs time to recover,” she said.
But the catnapping wasn’t Number Five’s first brush with trauma. He was born on an orchid farm, which asked Su to adopt him as a kitten after his sibling was eaten by a wild animal. She’s confident the pet, whose name reminds her of Chanel No. 5 perfume, will be back to his loving, outgoing self soon.
Sharla Flock, another flower vendor, said the whole market was in despair when he disappeared.
“Number Five is more than just a cat,” she said. “And man is he loved.”