Roscoe, a black German shepherd who died in November, was his friend and protector, his “guardian angel,” said Wannemacher, who is training coordinator for Greenville County Sheriff’s Office K9 Services.
Together, over a period of eight years, the pair arrested hundreds of criminals, and Roscoe helped with the seizure of guns and drugs and stolen property.
Roscoe was shot during one apprehension, for which he received the Medal of Valor from the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office and the North America Police Work Dog Association.
He was such a revered law enforcement officer that the Sheriff’s Office held a memorial service in the dog’s honor.
Wannemacher, who came to work for the Sheriff’s Office in 1999, began working with K9 Services in 2002, and Roscoe was his first partner.
“He rode with me every day,” said Wannemacher, who became K9 Services training coordinator in 2006. “Everywhere we went, he went. The adage I always use is that Roscoe was like my American Express: I never left home without him.”
He’s not exaggerating; Roscoe slept in a bed next to Wannemacher’s and was a buddy to Wannemacher’s toddler daughter. The dog was, he said, “literally part of the family.”
Wannemacher, who also has German shepherds and Belgian Malinois as pets, said the bond is hard to explain.
“People see me, I’m talking in the car. They think I’m talking on the radio; no, I’m talking to the dog,” Wannemacher said. “That’s the bond. The thing about a police dog, they know all your secrets. They know everything, they don’t tell on you. They help you. My first dog, Roscoe, I was a young handler. He saved me more than once because he was just, like, ‘No, we can’t do this.’ And you could tell, he was my protector, like my guardian angel.”
Wannemacher’s new partner is a Belgian Malinois named Striker. They’re still in the bonding stages, but Striker is beginning to pick up his handler’s habits.
“His personality is starting to change and mesh with mine because I’m a Type A, and he’s learning how to make spreadsheets,” Wannemacher joked. “He’s just starting to get serious and understands the job.”
The Sheriff’s Office has about 15 working dogs, Wannemacher said.
Ten are “utility dogs,” German shepherds and Belgian Malinois trained for tasks such as tracking, narcotics detection and building searches. In addition, there are two black Labrador retrievers, one for school narcotics enforcement and the other for bomb detection; a Belgian Malinois used in arson detection; and two bloodhounds that are deployed in missing persons cases or in long-range tracking for criminals.
The utility dogs, of which Roscoe was one, are “a full-service dog.”
“They’ll do everything. If somebody breaks into a house, and there’s a forced entry, we’ll allow the dog to search that,” Wannemacher said. “A perfect example is, Roscoe got shot in the line of duty May 19, 2004.
“Basically, an individual tried to run a deputy over, and he fled and bailed out of his car. Instead of the deputies running after him, we deployed Roscoe to apprehend him. ... The guy was armed and eventually shot Roscoe. If that were a deputy, the deputy would have been shot.”
The K9 Services program is important because it helps protect the people in Greenville County, Wannemacher said, but also because the animals are trained in Greenville, saving the taxpayers money.
Trainers begin working with the dogs when the animals are 18 months to 2 years old. To send a dog elsewhere for training is costly; at least $12,500 per dog, not counting the expenses incurred by the handler accompanying the dog, Wannemacher said.
This way, the dogs receive 600 hours of training by Greenville County Sheriff’s Office trainers, without the additional costs, he said. And the deputies are able to adjust or modify the training if the dog has problems with the work.
German shepherds have traditionally been the first choice for police dogs, but they are prone to hip dysplasia that causes pain and leads to early retirement, so Belgian Malinois are becoming more popular, Wannemacher said.
In fact, hip problems were what sparked Roscoe’s retirement in 2010.
But even in retirement, Roscoe, who often visited schools with Wannemacher and gave out paw prints as autographs, didn’t want to merely lie in the sun and sleep.
“Roscoe, even at the age of 13, would block my patrol car every day and try to get into it. He lived to work. That was his love, to be next to me, to go to work and to protect the citizens of Greenville,” Wannemacher said.
“To the very end, which was the hardest part for me, he was completely selfless. He wanted to be out there, he wanted to just work. The last day, we took him out for a ride in the patrol car, turned the lights on, he was like, ‘Wow.’
“That’s what he wanted to do. His demeanor changed. He just wanted to be out there again.”
(Greeneville Online - Dec 30, 2013)
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