It was 4 a.m. when Jack Jokinen woke up to find his wife standing over him with unusual news: Their 1-month-old daughter was fine, his wife said, but there was an unfamiliar dog in their living room.
Jokinen, 34, said he figured there had to be some kind of misunderstanding. Perplexed, he walked downstairs and found an emaciated dog sitting in the middle of the floor – wet, shaking and visibly afraid.
He worried that someone had broken into their Philadelphia house with the dog in tow. He checked the doors and then the windows. Everything was locked, and no one was hiding in the closets. So Jokinen pulled up the footage from his security camera.
The video solved the mystery. Around 3:15 a.m., a dog limped down the sidewalk past Jokinen’s house and then doubled back to look up the staircase leading to the home. She walked away and returned one last time before she cautiously pattered up the five steps and through the open front door.
He and Emily plotted their next steps, Jokinen said:
> “I just start Googling, ‘What do you do when you find a dog?’ because there’s really no playbook for this. “And surprisingly, we’ve never found a dog in our house before.”
The couple didn’t have the heart to turn her over to animal control. Instead, the Jokinens brought the dog to an emergency vet and paid for a $72 exam. They learned that she had ticks and fleas, damaged teeth, infected paws and an atrophied leg.
The dog didn’t have a microchip, but that was perfectly fine with the Jokinens. They decided by that point they wanted to make the dog, who is between 7 and 9 years old, the newest member of their family. They named her [Suzyn Pupman](https://www.instagram.com/suzynpupman/).
Jokinen is collecting donations through Venmo and PayPal while maintaining a public spreadsheet detailing where the money will go. Any funds that are left over after Suzy is nursed back to health will go to a yet-to-be-determined charity, Jokinen said. He said he had raised more than $25,000
