Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
K-9 Officer Buster dies at age 11
German shepherd was one of Chester County’s first K-9 officers
WEST CHESTER >> He looked fierce but had a sweet heart and a pair of eyebrows that captivated those who looked into his eyes.
He was intelligent, knowing the sound of a ring tone on a cellphone that would tell him at 4:30 a.m. that it was time to go to work.
He was trained well, and could adapt on his own when in his later years he found himself limited by physical impediments.
He was among the first of the Chester County Sheriff’s Office’s K-9 officers, a unit that now numbers 10, and, sadly, he is the first of that group to die.
Buster von Eck, a purebred German shepherd known to his owner/handler John Freas and “parent” Wendy Baigis simply as Buster, passed away on April 22 after a battle with
cancer and a nerve disorder. He would have turned 11 years old today.
Freas and Baigis made their decision to put Buster in the hands of West Chester veterinarian Dr. Jane Latta after watching his health decline, an agonizing choice they finally realized was best for him. Surgery would have kept him alive, but only for a few months, they said in an interview at the Chester County Justice Center, where all three worked until Freas’ retirement in March 2014 as the Sheriff’s Office lieutenant of operations. (Baigis is a supervisor in the county’s Adult Probation and Parole Department.)
“It would have been more for us …,” said Baigis. “…Than for him,” echoed Freas, finishing his wife’s thought.
Freas said that Buster came into their lives in 2009, after the Sheriff’s Office had started its K-9 team program. There had been bomb threats received by the county at various government offices, and to clear the buildings K-9 teams had to be called in from police departments around the region. First two K-9 officers were obtained, and then Freas and fellow Deputy Harry McKinney decided to get their own dogs, become trained in handling them, and supplement the county’s K-9 force.
“It was a win-win situation for us,” he said. “We got to work with the dogs, and the county got to keep going.”
Freas and McKinney found their dogs, Buster and Afra, at a training compound in Wapakoneta, Ohio. Freas remembers choosing to work with Buster after the trainer, Al Gill, threw a rubber ball into a field of tall grass and Buster was able to track it down in a moment. “I said, ‘This is the dog I want,’” he remembered. “Buster was an amazing dog.”
The pair underwent six weeks of training in explosive detection, tracking, patrol, and building searches. Slowly, they learned to react to one another as professionals and friends.
“We could get up at 4:40 in the morning and go to seven, eight, nine at night,” Freas said. “Me and Buster, we were partners. You always want your partner with you.” Buster knew from the sight of which uniform Freas would dress in — sheriff or police officer — whether he was on duty or not.
For Baigis, the adjustment to Buster was somewhat more challenging. When Freas was discussing getting a K-9 partner, she had one request. “I didn’t want a dark dog, because they look scary,” she recalled. Then in walked Buster, with a black face and torso and only hints of brown on his chest and legs. “I said, ‘Okay. He’s real dark.’
“But he had a sweet face,” she said, describing tan eyebrows that were touchingly expressive. “He was a sweet dog. It didn’t take long for him to grow on me. He ruined me for other dogs.”
Freas said that the trainer had told him that Buster “had a mind of his own. You might want him to do something, but he was going to do what he wanted to do.” So Freas began to “socialize” Buster by taking him to large events with numbers of people, including regular visits to the West Goshen Shopping Center, where he could become used to the cacophony of noise and swirl of people.
“He needed to know that everyone is not a threat, Freas said. “He learned that real well,” growing used to people, particularly children, fawning over him. But should there be a danger, Freas said all he would have to do was signal and Buster would “go into the police dog stance and do the bite and take-down.”
“At heart he was a sweet dog who, when he had a job to do, could do it well,” Baigis said. “But he just really wanted to hang out. The outward fierce appearance wasn’t what he was inside. The job he had, he did it, but it wasn’t who he really was.”
Freas remembered two instances when Buster showed his expertise and talent. First, when two children went missing from their home in New Garden and Freas and Buster were called in eight hours after they were last seen. Most tracking needs to be done within the first hour or so after a disappearance, but the pair kept at the task until, more than a mile away, they found the children hiding in a tree near a creek — scared of the dog who had come to help them get home.
At a bank robbery in Tredyffrin, Buster was able to track a scent from the suspect to a spot in a residential neighborhood several blocks away. He lost the scent, but proved crucial to the apprehension when it turned out there were video cameras on the home that had captured the suspect getting into a getaway car — exactly where Buster had last tracked him.
A year ago, two years after the team’s retirement, Buster began having difficulty with his hind legs, dragging them instead of lifting them. Latta diagnosed a nerve problem that made his rear end wobbly. But Baigis said he learned to adapt, making bunny hops with his legs that kept him moving. “He could still catch the bad guys if he had to,” he said. “That became the new normal for him.”
They took him on trips to Florida, and let him enjoy his life as best he could. He became sick earlier this year, and the tumor that would prove his undoing was found on his side.
Buster will be honored May 19 at a graduation ceremony of the county’s K-9 training course, in which K-9 teams from across the region are given instruction by certified trainers in the Sheriff’s Office. For now, he continues to occupy a place in the couple’s West Goshen home, sitting on a coffee table in a beautiful carved wooden box donated to the family by Latta’s office.