PET TRACKER by Kat Albrecht
Chapter 5, Pt 5 – A.J.’s First Walk-Up Find
A.J.’s first missing person case was incredible because it resulted in what is called a “walk-up find,” which is when your search dog leads you directly up to the missing person and you, well, walk up and find them. An Alzheimer’s patient became lost in Watsonville, a town 30 minutes from the university. The elderly man had wandered off from his home, and his family, friends, neighbors, along with Sheriff’s deputies and the entire Santa Cruz search-and-rescue team, had already been searching the woods around the home for over five hours before they called me. During this time, a tree cutter in the area said he saw the victim walking in a nearby orchard.
I was assigned a deputy to work as my “backup,” and it turned out that he had prior experience in running behind bloodhounds. He stood by as I collected the pillowcase of the missing man as my scent article. When I had A.J. sniff the pillowcase, my trusty hound immediately picked up the man’s scent and dragged me along a specific route, making occasional sharp turns. The only problem was that A.J. was leading us in the opposite direction of the orchard where the missing man was supposedly seen. We were at the mercy of where A.J. led us, and he didn’t let us down. Within 15 minutes of giving him that pillowcase to sniff, A.J. had tracked deep into the woods and was now standing, wagging his tail and begging for a cheese treat, in front of a very stinky but happy old man who had wet himself and smelled like urine. He was at risk of hypothermia but was going to be OK. I was elated and proud, the search management team members were surprised, and the deputy with me was impressed. That deputy was later instrumental in championing my being grandfathered onto the Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Office S.W.A.T. team.
The day after the search, I was interviewed by a couple of newspapers that honored A.J. for his great tracking work. That admiration, however, was not shared by a few jealous search dog handlers affiliated with a different K-9 team based in a nearby county. I had networked with a gal who was on that other team, and she relayed to me a week later what happened at their training session following our appearance in the local newspaper. The leader of that team, whose own search dogs had not performed all that well, said at their team meeting, “Let’s talk about this media fiasco” and proceeded to bad mouth me behind my back. Jealousy and back-biting knew no bounds, I was to discover, within both the search-and-rescue and the police K-9 communities.
But I was still riding high from our success in Watsonville when an opportunity presented itself a few weeks later for me to work A.J. on his first felony case. I was working dayshift on patrol when I heard on the radio that an armed bank robbery had taken place at the Bank of America in Santa Cruz, just a few miles from the campus. I happened to have A.J. kenneled at work, so I asked the on-duty UCSC Sergeant permission to respond with A.J. to work the robbery. My Sergeant granted permission, so our dispatcher called Santa Cruz P.D. and offered the use of my bloodhound. They gladly accepted, as none of the local patrol K-9’s were available.
The search itself was a bust. A.J. trailed the bank robber’s scent from the front door of the bank through the back parking lot, down an alley, and then into a neighborhood directly behind the bank, where he then lost the scent. We checked all directions but A.J. kept indicating there was no longer a scent trail. I debriefed with the detectives on the scene, telling them that based on my training with A.J. and his losing the scent, I believed the suspect had left in a vehicle.
I was giddy with excitement that we had worked our first felony case. However, my excitement was short lived and it didn’t take long for the ball to drop. The very next day after the bank robbery case, when I showed up to work my dayshift patrol assignment, I was called into Chief Tepper’s office. It turned out that the K-9 Officer from the Santa Cruz Police Department had showed up earlier that morning to meet with Chief Tepper to complain about my working A.J. on the bank robbery case. They contended that they supposedly had never heard of me and my bloodhound (despite our being in the newspaper for A.J.’s previous find), they didn’t know if I was qualified to work cases or not, and they didn’t appreciate my working my bloodhound on cases that they would normally work their patrol dogs on. It was clearly a pissing match, and Santa Cruz P.D. was claiming their territory and apparently, my slobbery bloodhound and I were not welcome.
Of course, that K-9 Officer had told Chief Tepper that I was “welcome to join us at our weekly K-9 training sessions.” Chief Tepper gave me the piece of paper the K-9 Officer had left that listed the day, time, and address of this “training” session. I knew what patrol K-9 training involved because I had a close friend when I lived in Fresno who worked a K-9. Their idea of “tracking” was very different from the scent discrimination trailing work that I used to train A.J. I consulted with another law enforcement bloodhound handler about my dilemma.
“You could teach them about scent and real tracking training,” my friend said. I knew he was right, but I went to the Santa Cruz P.D. K-9 training anyway, hoping for a miracle.
Their training consisted of four different German Shepherd patrol dogs doing things like biting an officer dressed in a thick burlap “bite suit,” searching for and finding a “suspect” who hid behind a small “blind” about 40 yards away that was one-fourth the size of a baseball backstop, and “tracking” that involved following a very short, 15-minute-old track with a Kong dog toy at the end as the reward. The officers there knew who I was but ignored me. I did introduce myself to the K-9 Officer who’d finked on me, but the conversation was short and terse. I never went back to their training sessions again.
We were on our own.
