Losing a child is every parent’s worst nightmare and when that child turns out to be a Beanie Baby monkey named Bongo, that nightmare doesn’t get any less real. When two Manhattanites, 47-year-old Bonni Marcus and 58-year-old Jack Zinzi, sat down for dinner in Brooklyn on Sunday night, it was only a matter of moments before Bonni’s motherly intuition told her something wasn’t right. She reached into her pocket only to find that the platonic couple’s constant companion of more than ten years had gone missing. Said Marcus to the Brooklyn Paper:

“I was in a bad way. Bongo really means a lot to me, so I kind of broke down. It happened so fast, because I couldn’t have been in the restaurant 10 minutes before I realized he was gone.”

After frantically checking their car, the couple sprung to action by peppering the neighborhood with posters offering a $500 reward for Bongo’s safe return.

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