May 26, 2010 10 AM: Today is test day at the Southern Tier Police Canine Association 2010 Police Cadaver Dog seminar. If we pass, Raven and Ripley will be certified Police Cadaver Dogs through the Eastern Police Canine Association. This is Ripley’s 5th time through the process. We re-certify every year. Raven, my 2-year-old, is taking the test for the first time. Several other dog teams are testing today as well including Dick Szczesh and Amanda Scarpato from Amigo Search and Rescue along with their golden retrievers Buddy and Libby.
We have trained and prepared for what is ahead. Still I feel pre-exam nerves. When I got up this morning, I thought “Why am I doing this? I took vacation days to torture myself. ” The truth is my idea of a good time involves putting myself to the test. My guts are roiling. Breathe…..4 counts in, hold for 4, 4 counts out, hold for 4…repeat.. OK. that’s a little better. Pre-frontal cortex is back in the driver’s seat. My reptile brain is still sending out waves of stress but now it feels more like excitement than panic.
4 PM. We made it through all the tests. Both dogs passed. In fact, they did great. Tests are usually set up so that an average dog on an average day has a good chance of passing. They aren’t supposed to be tricky. Still, the buried hide was interesting and allowed the girls to show off a little.
We had an acre area mixed wood and field with a substantial incline. The parking area was on the top. There was a small drainage on one side, and a road on the other. Grass turned to dirt at the bottom of the area.
Sun's energy creates scent cone in opposite direction from the prevailing wind
My plan had been to work from the stream toward the road using the wind. But as I walked toward the evaluator to explain the plan to him, Raven had a head pop. Scrapping the plan I had just outlined I let her go. The sun’s energy heated the dark road surface, pulling the cool air out of the copse of trees creating a little micro current opposite the direction of the wind and a beautiful scent cone for Raven to work. The problem took less than 3 minutes.
The day was miserably hot and humid. To spare the dogs we worked each dog through a single scenario before moving on to the next. The dogs had time to rest and cool off. But I found the waiting a challenge. My ability to channel stress diminishing with each trial. By the last test, the vehicle search, I was sending tension like an electric charge down the lead to Raven. It wasn’t terrible; we did fine, but Dan Wilcox noticed, and that was disappointing. My goal is to keep up appearances from start to finish. We are making progress. Five years ago, at my first EPCA trial, I looked like a wreck the entire time.
Dan Wilcox EPCA Judge Ripley indicating on buried training aid
The truth is I am confident and competent. I know how hard and how often we train. I am good at reading my dogs and I am accurate in my assessments–cataloging our strengths and weaknesses realistically. That is the image I want to present. At the therapeutic boarding school I work at, nobody confuses expressions of doubt with lack of competence. But when I am hanging out with cops, the rules are different. If I want them to see the truth, I need to lie. To present as the confident and competent person I am, I need to keep any and all misgivings to myself. More than anything, for me, taking these tests is my way of working on my persona as a dog handler. So I will go back next year and try again. Maybe mirrored shades will help…..
Rip and Raven are certified in Human remains detection by both civilian and law enforcement organizations. They re-certify every year.
Four of us decided to celebrate the new year with a weekend of training. Katie Danzig, Karen Pardini, and Sarah Sherburne spent the better part of Saturday and Sunday, January 2nd and 3rd, with me at the Family Foundation School, along with all of our dogs: Abby and Raven, Ripley, Scout, Katya and Suki. Oh, and don’t forget Lily, our beagle. She’s not part of the team but she keeps the other, bigger dogs in line. We also watched Buddy Meyer’s dog, Max, for the weekend. Altogether that’s eight dogs, four handlers and one husband, mine–Sid Parham.
Truth be told, much of the weekend went to dog walking and dog obedience. With three German shepherds, two Dobermans, and Mallanios there were lots of little ranking issues to deal with; but nothing a five-minute down stay couldn’t handle.
Karen rewards Suki after she makes a building find
Abby and Raven squabbled just like the two sisters they are. They also have a wonderful time playing with each other. But there were a few times when their exuberance got out of hand so we cooled things down with a few time-outs. I don’t think there was a single second of actual canine aggression. But SAR dog handlers need to respect the sensibilities of the average person. Civilians are put off by dogs growling at each other–even when it’s perfectly normal doggy communication.
Lily’s little and it’s a good thing. If she weighs much of the shepherds she’d be the alpha bitch. As it was we caught her trying to dominate the Mallanios, Max. I can’t figure out any G-Rated way to explain what she was doing to him.
The new year brought our first serious winter weather. Snow on the ground. Snow falling. Bitterly cold temperatures with a significant wind chill. Large area search problems were out of the question. So we decided to focus on snow burial, HRD, and a little navigation.
Matt dressed for the weather
Two students from the Family Foundation School, Jens and Matt, prepared the sites for the snow burial problems and acted as subjects. They had a ball playing in the snow. Our two youngest dogs Abby and Raven, had no difficulty finding them.
Jens after a hard day in the snow
We spent the rest of the weekend indoors as much as possible using an unfinished building to train in human remains detection.
Katie and Karen took lots of pictures. Here’s a great sequence of Abby doing her first Snow burial.
Wednesday, August 26th 2009 we responded to Knight’s Eddy, NY to help locate drowning victim HIN HON SIU, age 36, of Jamaica, New York. He had drowned on Sunday, August 23rd. He had been rafting with three friends near the Staircase Rapids when his raft overturned and he did not resurface. Rain has swollen the river on the 23rd making the rapids more dangerous than usual and hampering rescue efforts for the next two days. U.S. Parks Department Officers called me late Tuesday morning and we made arrangements for the next day.
Wednesday was the first day that the river was calm enough to search effectively with divers. The dogs were tasked to search just below the point last seen. If they could pinpoint an area, they could reduce the amount of river bottom that divers needed to search. Three teams from Eagle Valley were deployed: Findling and Stryder, Pardini and Suki, Warren and Quax. A fourth team was deployed from Ramapo Search and Rescue Dogs. All four teams completed their assignments and reported the dogs were alerting in a single area just below the point last seen (PLS). Divers were sent to search that area.
Meanwhile, I put together a second round of assignments. The trickiest part of searching the river is getting the dogs and boats to the places that need to be searched. I enlisted the help of a Pennsylvania Environmental Conservation Officer whose name I can’t remember who has lived his entire life in the area and knew every road, trail and boat landing.
Local Guide and EVDOGS Handler Liz Dalton
Amir Findling came prepared with a complete set of maps for the river from the point where the boat capsized down to Port Jervis. We both thought it likely that the body had already resurfaced and traveled beyond where the main search effort was focused. After sinking to the bottom for a period of time, drowning victims resurface. When they resurface depends upon several factors including the water temperature. The warmer the water, the sooner the victim surfaces. We were looking at a three day interval in August. If the body hadn’t become stuck, wedged in between rocks or debris, it very likely had already surfaced.
We planned to search at least 6 miles from the point last seen. This was both our experience with fast moving water, and was also indicated in Bob Koester’s Lost Person Behavior. 95% of drowning victims on rivers were located within 8 miles of the pls. If I had had more dogs, I would have extended the search area out the full 8 miles. We had three other dogs teams that hadn’t been deployed yet, me and Ripley, Katie Danzig and Scout, and Dick Szczesh and K-9 Buddy from Amigo Search and Rescue Dogs. The three teams that had been out in the morning were also ready for a second assignment. The plan was to search high probability areas–places where a floating body might get stuck on shore or in strainers along the river bank.
Amir came prepared with arial photos of the river
Just as we were getting ready to deploy the second round, a kayaking found him washed up on shore. He was found where we planned to deploy one of our teams–5.6 mile from the PLS, near an access point my guide had identified. I was glad the victim had been found. Diving is always dangerous. Having recently completed a course in lost person behavior, I was also gratified that we’d come up with a good plan.
Delaware River from PLS to where subject was found
What about the dogs who alerted earlier near the point last seen? Divers recovered a shoe positively identified as belonging to the victim exactly where the Ramapo dog indicated. Most likely the dogs were alerting on the shoe and possibly other items belonging to the subject. It is also likely they were alerting on the residual scent left by victim who had been in that spot for at least a day, probably two. Its likely he was under the water Monday and most of Tuesday. Once he had surfaced the journey downstream would not have taken long. His final location was out in the open, clearly visible to any river traffic. I had been on the shore since early that morning. There was no recreational traffic early in the morning. The first rafters started passing our location at Knights Eddy just an hour or so before he was located. The victim was probably seen by the very first kyacker that went past him that day.
K-9s Ripley and Raven both got a chance to demonstrate their abilities at the International Police Work Dog Nationals in Fayetteville, NC. September 20-25, 2009. Raven certified as a cadaver dog at the basic level. This was Raven’s first certification. Ripley certified in article searching and in advanced cadaver. She had passed the basic cadaver certification in May of this year. Since 2006, Ripley has been certified in human remains detection each year by the Eastern Police Canine Association.
Eagle Valley Search Dogs gets a call for K-9s to do a search by Ranger Sarah Gessler for the next day. The subject had been missing for 4 days. He has walked off before and gotten as far as Ellenville, 18 miles away. The Incident Commander was Ranger Robert Dawson. He was very happy to have the dogs there to assist. Dawnson assigned Ripley to do a search of the trailer park. While we were deploying Ripley, we took K-9 Maya to the PLS to see if we could get a direction of travel. The weather had been perfect to allow scent to still be present, however, also perfect for it to have a lot of movement. At 9:00am, I scented Maya off some underwear at the bottom of the subject’s personal laundry bag and casted her around the subject’s home several times…. every time she committed herself to the same direction.
The subject lived in a trailer park…Maya led us along the western side of the trailer park. She then went down into the woods to a swamp. For the past 4 days wind had mostly been blowing northwest and west so the scent on these nice days kept moving southeast and eastward. Maya went with the flow of the scent and went southeast. The farther she went in that direction the weaker she got, in terms of scent available. She turned herself around and headed west down a hill at a faster tempo and then turned north with tremendous intensity! At this point, it’s raining for about 40 minutes fairly hard. Maya forcefully leads us back the direction we came. At this point we had been searching for 75 minutes and I was trying to make sense of why she was so focused on the direction we originally came from. I discontinued my search there because this was the first 96 hour old trail that I had ever done and I felt that it was my responsibility to stop there and go back to base and report the dog’s behaviors through her trail. I was thinking that either there was a scent pool in that area….but we went through where we ended up before and she still wanted to charge ahead, or maybe a much hotter trail of the subject….like 24 hours younger or so? …… you never know where a subject goes or has been once they are missing. In the afternoon, subject would be located by ground searchers about 500 feet north from where Maya brought us down to the swamp.
Back at home after the search, I looked at the track map, the subject’s location, and factoring in the weather and comparing it with the my aged trails of 24-48 hours old, Maya was behaving the same way that she did when she was new at the 24-48 hours old trails. Meaning she road out the entire scent picture and went until she had no more scent at all and then turned around and got more excited the closer she got to the subject’s actual tracks…… that’s my educated guess. So learn from this, always trust your dog and utilize what knowledge you have in parallel situations.
Rita’s Perspective
We deployed Ripley twice. Firs we cleared the trailer park. Ripley had a head-lift behind the subject’s home facing west and looking across a steep bank in the general direction of the river where the subject would be found later that day. I noted it on my map but it wasn’t part of my assigned area, and Maya had already shown a great deal of interest toward the south.
My second assignment took me south of the trailer park. The picture below shows the route that I traveled. The subject’s location in red and Ripley’s head pops in blue. The ring lines each denote 1/10 of a mile from the subject’s home.
About 1/2 mile from the subject’s location as we searched the edge of the river, Ripley gave a very clear head pop along the river heading north. Most of the day there was very little wind but I noted a tiny breeze from the north just as she became more animated. We worked the shore as best I could back to the trailer park. The bank was quite steep and I wasn’t equipped for wadeing. Except for that single head pop, Ripley showed no interest in the river. If I had seen more interest, I might have continued working the river bank. No one would have objected. I’d been given a great deal of latitude by Ranger Dawson to work my assignment as I thought best. But Ripley didn’t, so I completed my task and returned to base. I was also influenced by Maya’s trail. I had an image of Maya’s route in my head and it framed all my thinking.
In my briefing, Ranger Dawson told me that the subject was known to take long walks, so when he assigned Ripley to search around the skiriting of all the trailers just in case he was underneath, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to deploy Maya. We might get a direction of travel, even after all that time. We didn’t understand Maya’s behavior as well as we do now and it led us to focus our efforts south of the PLS. What I saw from Maya led me to belive that the subject walked south. As Kyle explains, this was the first time Maya worked such an old trail and she was working out the entire scent picture, not focusing on the track. If we had known how to read her better, we would have understood what she was doing when she led Kyle back toward the PLS. Live and learn. In this case, my mis-interpretation of Maya’s behavior led me to discount the meaning of Ripley’s behavior.
Another lesson I learned on this search is that the rangers’ search strategies are robust because they are systematic. As long as resources are available, high probability areas including everything within 1/2 mile to a mile of the point last seen, are typically searched mutliple times. Ranger Meade took out the Sullivan County Search Team and they grid searched along the river and found the subject. In the end, what matters is the job got done–not which resource found the subject.
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