A keen sense of service

AUBURN – The two-day search for a boater whose body was found in Dark Brook Reservoir last week could have lasted several more days if not for the special training of Fire Department dog Riggs, investigators said.

The 16-month-old Labrador, handled by Firefighter/EMT Matt Ethier, has been an eager assistant for about a year.

The dog is trained to assist dive teams and firefighters as they look for human remains in bodies of water or burned buildings.

On Friday, about 90 minutes into the second day of the search for Douglas Flink Sr., Riggs helped pinpoint the body of the missing man. Riggs alerted to Flink’s scent within 20 feet of where a Worcester firefighter ultimately found him.

Flink, 56, was about 14 feet underwater, and about 80 yards away from where investigators found Flink’s boat, Fire Chief Stephen Coleman Jr. said.

When firefighters arrived after receiving several 911 calls around 6 p.m. Thursday reporting that a boater went missing in the water, the boat was circling in waters off Bryn Mawr Avenue with nobody aboard.

When a body sinks, its odor comes to the surface of the water.

But Ethier, who knows the Flink family, making Friday’s discovery all the more personal, admitted he wasn’t sure Riggs would be able to find the body, given the conditions.

“I even said to the dive commander, I don't know how it's going to work out because it's pretty windy and the current in the water was actually moving pretty decent,” Ethier said.

“But we put Riggs in the boat. We started up current and worked our way down.”

Ethier, 33, said he and the dive coordinator went out first thing in the morning Friday, which was ideal because the water hadn’t been disturbed by other boats and divers.

“It was kind of a fresh slate,” he said.

Ethier said he could tell when the boat was closing in on the body because Riggs “put his nose on the water and looked at me.”

While it’s never a happy occasion, given a family and community’s loss, Ethier suggested the discovery validated the training he's providing Riggs with the help of others. He singled out the environmental police, Quincy police and retired Auburn police dog handler James Ljunggren.

“You don't know if you're ever going to even use the dog,” Ethier said. “People train their dogs and they'll go their whole career without using them.”

Riggs is trained to look for indications of a decayed body.

Some of Ethier's training aids aren’t necessarily for the faint of heart. He maintains human blood, bones, two frozen placentas, one of which was burnt, and a small corpse.

In a training drill Ethier conducted Tuesday, Riggs remained in Ethier's SUV as the firefighter took an airtight mason jar that contained a placenta. Wearing gloves, so that his own scent would not be a clue to the dog, Ethier placed the “hide” in a storage shed behind fire headquarters, about 50 feet away from Riggs.

In the other direction, Ethier placed a towel containing the scent of his training aids about 80 feet away, and hidden in tall shrubs.

Cued to “find it,” Riggs found both training aids in little time.

“When you look at the training regimen that Riggs has had, and when you look at what he's able to do,” Coleman said, “we're not quite sure that there's a dog in the country that has the type of training.”

Coleman said people often don't understand the level of commitment that goes into specialty training, especially those that involve animals.

“These guys train every day.”

They save time in dangerous dive operations that can last multiple days.

“It not only saves us time, so we can have quick closure for the families, which is what we're looking for,” Coleman said. “But, in ponds like Dark Brook that are extremely dangerous, they're very weedy.”

One might as well be swimming through underwater woods, he said.

“Talking to the divers - they are literally fighting through weeds,” Coleman said. “Their hands are physically moving weeds so they can swim through. So the longer these types of dive operations go on… Let's say it is a two- or three-day event. The more divers we have to put in the water over the course of those three days, all we are doing is increasing the risk that we are going to have a severe injury or potentially a diver fatality in those kind of situations

“That's something that you just can't put a price on. It's worth its weight in gold. We're just so lucky and fortunate that not only do we have this asset, but the town of Auburn has always supported its public safety, and supported innovative initiatives like this.”

Because of its relationships with other communities, Auburn is often invited to fire scenes in other communities so that Riggs can take part in “hides” in fire-damaged buildings, Ethier said.

Riggs is Ethier’s second attempt at training a dog for this purpose. He said the other dog, which he eventually adopted, didn’t work out because it was too focused on the scent of decayed animals.

Ethier said he was able to get Riggs from Foxbend, a breeder in labs and German shepherds in Hillsborough, New Hampshire. The breeder donated the lab to the Auburn Fire Department, after an officer from the state environmental police reached out to the breeder.

A few of Riggs’ relatives are on the environmental police in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, according to Ethier, who said he pushed for the department to get a dog a couple of years ago, after Auburn responded to a mutual aid call in Oxford.

During that incident, investigators searched hours for an Oxford resident who died in freezing conditions in a house that Ethier classified as a hoarding situation.

Although the body was near an entrance, the search lasted hours, Ethier said.

“I thought, a dog would be able to handle that pretty easy,” said Ethier, who presented the idea to District 7 as a means of helping out on dive calls and the recovery of fire victims.

“That's when I took the initiative, got the dog and started training,” Ethier said.

“He spent a lot of time on his own,” Deputy Fire Chief Glenn Johnson said.

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