SALT LAKE CITY – An 8-year-old Utah boy wrote a letter to his local newspaper after an animal shelter worker failed to write a note to save his cat from being euthanized. “Yesterday grown-ups killed my kitty, my best friend, when they weren’t supposed to,” he said.

The letter appeared in The Herald Journal, of Logan, on Thursday. By Friday, it had received the fourth-most comments on the newspaper’s website.

The boy, Rayden Sazama, just wanted to share his love of his cat, Toothless.

“I just wanted to tell people about Toothless — that I loved him,” he told The Associated Press through his father, Jason Sazama, on Friday.

Toothless, a fluffy, black cat who roamed the cow pasture next door, slipped out his kitty door Sept. 28 and didn’t return home. By Sunday, Rayden and his younger brother, Devin, were going door to door, asking neighbors if they had seen the cat.

Everyone said they hadn’t.

Jason Sazama checked the Cache Humane Society’s website but didn’t see any photos of Toothless. After two busy days on the road for work, he decided to swing by the organization’s shelter to see if Toothless had turned up.

The shelter had already closed for the evening, but a worker allowed Sazama inside, where Toothless sat in a cage. There was just one problem: Sazama still needed to pay the impound fee at a government building that was also closed.

The worker assured Sazama the cat would be fine, and he returned home, crowing: “I found Toothless! We’ll get him tomorrow.”

But when Sazama returned the next day, the receipt for his impound payment in hand, he discovered that Toothless had already been euthanized. The worker had forgotten to put a note on the cage.

“Now I don’t know what to do,” the boy’s letter concludes. “My cat Toothless is dead; the people that killed him didn’t even give him to my dad so we could bury him. What do I do now?”