A dog was lost for 5 years. Then he showed up at a fraternity house.

Neal Rachal walked out the back door of his fraternity house and saw an unexpected visitor: a light brown Yorkshire Terrier wearing a tiny red shirt.

Rachal, president of Kappa Sigma at the University of Southern Mississippi, figured the dog had run off from another house on Fraternity Row, so he sent a picture of the Yorkshire Terrier to his neighbors.

But when Rachal returned about two hours later, nobody had claimed the dog, who was then hiding behind a pile of wood in the backyard. Rachal brought him inside, where another brother said he looked like a Benji, so that became his temporary name.

The brothers embraced having a pet: Benji attended Kappa Sigma’s intramural softball win and was the team’s good luck charm. He went grocery shopping with the brothers when they bought steaks for a barbecue.

The Kappa Sigma members initiated Benji as a brother for a week before saying goodbye. They learned his heartbreaking backstory and reunited him with his owner, Debbie LaFleur. She said she never expected to see the dog again.

Benji’s name was actually Kingston, and five years earlier, he had fled his Louisiana home about 250 miles away.

LaFleur and her husband, Joseph, bought Kingston from a breeder when he was a puppy. He enjoyed sitting on a swinging chair on the porch of their Lake Charles, Louisiana, house and eating the same food as Joseph, including McDonald’s chicken nuggets and vanilla ice cream. Joseph, a Dallas Cowboys fan, made his dog a miniature navy blue jersey that said “KINGSTON” on the back in white letters. The two were inseparable.

Hurricane Laura, which struck southwest Louisiana in August 2020, shattered their house’s windows, most of which Joseph boarded. Two months later, LaFleur came home after work but couldn’t find Kingston, who normally waited by the front door.

Kingston might have escaped through a small window in the garage that Joseph had not repaired, LaFleur said. They asked neighbors, Facebook friends and Kingston’s microchip company, PetLink, to help locate him. But after months of searching, LaFleur said they lost hope.

“We were devastated,” LaFleur told the Washington Post. “He was a huge, huge part of our family.”

The next year, LaFleur adopted a white Shih Tzu named Cooper. Then, in August 2022, tragedy hit when Joseph, 56, died unexpectedly.

As she grieved her husband, it never entered her mind that years later, his missing dog would be lounging outside Kappa Sigma’s house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

On March 30, the dog sat with the fraternity’s 54 members at their chapter meeting. Kappa Sigma posted a call-out for the dog’s owner on Facebook.

The next day, fraternity vice president John Christopher took the dog to a local veterinarian, who found that a Lake Charles animal clinic placed his microchip. PetLink reached out to LaFleur, 62, to let her know that Kingston had been found. She thought the message was a scam.

When Christopher told LaFleur over the phone that it was true, however, she broke down in tears. She recalled yelling “they found Kingston” to her boss at the Catholic church where she is a bookkeeper. Christopher told LaFleur that fraternity members would take care of him until she could drive four hours to pick him up, she said.

Kingston, whom fraternity members continued calling Benji, spent most of his time with Rachal, sleeping in his bed and taking walks with him around campus. But when Rachal was in classes for the university’s nursing program, Kingston spent time with other fraternity members.

The dog enjoyed roaming the sand volleyball court in the fraternity house’s backyard and playing with two stuffed bears that the brothers gave him. When the guys sat in the house’s living room to watch sports, Kingston settled on a couch with them. The brothers fed him chicken and rice from a campus cafeteria. They shoveled his poop in the backyard.

Word of Kingston’s visit spread across campus, and students came to the fraternity house to meet him.

“He definitely lived the life,” said Rachal, a 20-year-old sophomore.

The day the dog became an official fraternity member, Rachal wrote in a letter: “Congratulations Benji you are receiving this bid and initiation card because you have exemplified the values of a true Kappa Sigma man.”

When LaFleur and her son, Jared, drove to Hattiesburg on April 4, they worried that Kingston wouldn’t remember them. But when LaFleur arrived and shouted Kingston’s name, the dog’s ears perked up, and he sprinted to her across the sidewalk. She picked him up, and Kingston licked her and rested his head on her.

Fraternity members were sad to see him go, they said. They had hoped to include him in their next chapter photo.

It remains a mystery where Kingston, who weighs roughly eight pounds, was for almost five years, but LaFleur said he was in good condition when they reunited. Lauren Piandes, brand and content manager for Datamars, which owns PetLink, said in an email that the company doesn’t know if Kingston visited a veterinarian in the years he was missing.

Kingston, 11, was as energetic as ever on the drive home from Mississippi, jumping from window to window to look outside.

He pouted for a few days after returning home, LaFleur said, maybe realizing Joseph was no longer there. Then he returned to his normal routine: sleeping in LaFleur’s room and waiting by the front door for her to return from work.

“It has truly helped my grief from losing my husband,” LaFleur said, “because I feel like I have a piece of him back with Kingston.”