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LOS ANGELES — Strangers united recently to find and return a young boy's most prized possession: a soft brown bunny he lost on a side street in Los Angeles.
Two-and-a-half-year-old Max Page dropped the bunny, which doesn't have a name, in the Venice Canals neighborhood earlier this month. The bunny had been given to him by his grandmother, who passed away last summer.
"It's never taken outside of the house," Frances Page, Max's mom, told TODAY. "He must've snuck it into the stroller and dropped it."
Upon noticing the bunny's absence, the family began to search, posting both physical and virtual missing signs. One of the signs, posted on the photo-sharing app Instagram, was noticed by a user who later tracked down Jason Ho, a Minneapolis resident visiting Los Angeles for the first time. Ho had posted a single picture to Instagram during a recent walk: a plush brown bunny lying abandoned on the sidewalk.
"The fur matted down from hugs and squeezes, I could tell this little guy laying in the sun had been much loved," Ho wrote on his blog. " But by it's whimsical position on the ground he must have been abandoned on accident."
Ho said he could hear the voices of a mother and child nearby, and, figuring the owner of the bunny must be close, he left it undisturbed.
Six hours later, he was tagged in an Instagram post by someone who had seen the missing bunny photo and searched Instagram for other photos taken near Venice Canals.
"I geeked out for a few minutes thinking about the craziness of how the owner of a stuffed bunny I randomly found on a street was now trying to find me," Ho wrote. "Excited to have a part in this missing bunny case I immediately contacted the user who had posted the missing sign."
Ho sent a map of where he had taken the photo, and Max's parents began to search. The next morning, Ho was tagged in a second photo — this time, one of Max holding up his bunny in celebration.
"Bunny found. And a little boy was happy," Ho said.
