A San Francisco woman whose five-year-old miniature Australian shepherd Jackson was taken from outside a grocery store in Bernal Heights in December is being reunited with the pooch after he turned up in a Los Angeles shelter.

Emilie Talermo made headlines four months ago when she pulled out all the stops to try to find her dognapped companion, whom she believed was taken by a man seen briefly in some surveillance video on December 14 outside Good Life grocery store on Cortland Avenue. She hired a pilot to fly a banner over the city, launched a website, posted an ad on Tinder, offered a $5,000 reward for Jackson’s return (upping it further later), and handed out over 3,000 flyers, to no avail. The only thing that succeeded in locating the dog was a microchip that the LA animal shelter found which gave them Talermo’s phone number.

She tells the Chronicle that she was still unsure at first that this could be possible, so she asked them to send her a photo. "They did and it’s him,” she said. “I just busted into tears.”

Talermo explained that she had friends retrieve Jackson from the shelter, and then just as she was planning to drive down to retrieve him, her car broke down. But an SFPD detective assigned to her case offered to go down and get him instead.

This also couldn't have happened sooner — Talermo tells the Chronicle that she was planning to move out of SF for good this weekend, on her way to stay with family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming before moving to Portugal, where she has dual EU citizenship.

I guess people are still doing things like moving across the globe?

Update: The Chronicle has video of the reunion Tuesday morning, and apparently an arrest was made in the case last Friday. The SFPD cited a man from Palmdale, 27-year-old Nicholas Bravo, in the theft of the dog, and he was already in custody in San Joaquin County on unrelated charges. It's unclear still how the dog went from his custody to the animal shelter in L.A. County.