Mercer County Sheriff’s Office sniffs out missing person
JOB WELL DONE
n BY JENNIFER TRATTLER
Let’s get to work.
Let’s go find him.
Let’s go buddy.
Mercer County Sheriff’s Officers Local 187 Member David
Smithson whispers these words to his partner, K-9 Officer Maverick,
before the duo tracks a missing person.
On June 11, the Sheriff’s Office received a call from the Trenton
Police Department requesting the assistance of its K-9 unit to help
locate an 82-year-old man with dementia who went missing from his
home earlier that morning.
With the help of Maverick, a bloodhound, Smithson was able to
track down the subject’s scent over 2,000 feet, across Route 29, over
guardrails, through heavy brush and along the steep riverbank, where
the man had been sitting in chest-high water in the Delaware River for
several hours.
The quick and successful search-and-rescue would not have been
possible without the Sheriff’s Office’s K-9 unit, which was established
in 1993.
“The Mercer County Sheriff’s Office K-9 unit serves as an added
component of law enforcement to assist local towns and municipalities on a moment’s notice,” said Mercer County Sheriff Jack Kemler,
a former K-9 handler.
The Sheriff’s Office serves 15 municipalities and its K-9 unit
averages more than 150 calls per year. Smithson partnered with the
three-and-a-half-year-old Maverick in 2013 after graduating from the
New Jersey Department of Corrections Bloodhound Class.
Maverick successfully led Smithson to the subject’s location, but
that would not have been possible without precise execution leading
up to the tracking.
Smithson – off-duty when the call came in – hurried home to pick
up his car and his partner before heading to the missing person’s last
known location, his residence.
There, as is procedure, Smithson completes a pre-track analysis of
the situation to understand the missing person’s physical stature,
mental state and routine activity in the area. The officer then secures
an uncontaminated scent article.
“I collect it myself,” said Smithson, in this instance collecting a pillowcase. “I put it in a zip lock bag and take the scent article to the last
known location of the subject.”
Smithson retrieves Maverick from the car, straps on his harness and
whispers those magic words, because as he explained, “It gets him
excited.”
The officer then pulls the zip lock bag over the bloodhound’s nostrils, telling him to “check-it” while letting the K-9 take a good whiff
before he shakes his way out of it. The bloodhound is biologically
engineered for tracking, as he has four billion olfactory receptor cells
compared to a human’s five million.
“The dog is tracking dead skin cells, skin rafts,” described Smithson.
“The dog is following, detecting and sniffing. Picture you walking
holding baby powder and squeezing it continuously. Those particles
are the best representative of what skin rafts look like coming off of
us.”
Maverick detects those skin rafts and makes a beeline toward Route
29.
“I thought it was quick, so I held him up,” explained Smithson. “We
circled the front of the yard, crossed the street and checked the opposite side of sidewalk before crossing back over to the house and he
began tracking in the first direction.”
Smithson followed the dog’s inst