LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The Jefferson County Search Dog Association is ready around the clock for any call to help search and rescue a missing person.
"We're called by Metro Safe. We deploy to find missing children, elderly, dementia patients, people hiking in the woods that are lost. So we get called out for a variety of missing people," member James Brown said.
To aid their efforts, the group using canines, among numerous other technologies.
"It's very important, we've got to be able to set up a radio to contact the people in the field and now we don't have antennas, tripods, equipment, tools," Brown said. "We just don't have anything."
All of the squad's gear is gone. Brown has typically kept it all in a trailer, securely locked, in the backyard of his home on Alger Ave. near Iroquois Park.
He woke up on New Year's Eve and checked his Blink camera, which showed the trailer not in its usual spot.
"It was kind of gut-wrenching. I mean you're sitting there and it's gone," Brown said.
A neighbor's Ring doorbell camera shows a white SUV pulling away what appears to be a white trailer, matching that of the association's.
"The had to have been scouting. They had to know where it was at and they had to be proficient in being thieves," Brown said. "They had seen it, they targeted it, and they came and got it."
Brown estimates the trailer and the equipment cost about $7,000.
"It definitely is going to hurt. It's going to stop us. We are not going to be able to be as efficient at our communications capabilities as we were in the past and that actually hinders the safety of the missing person and of our team," Brown said.
The group is made up of all volunteers, who largely foot the bill for the equipment.
"It's going to take us a while to build it, it took us a while to get it," he said. "So it's not only time, money, and effort, and a hit to our community, it's just kind of devastating."
The association has reported the theft to LMPD, and remains hopeful the public's help can result in the return of their belongings.
"The big hope is that we get the content of the trailer," brown said. "However we can get it, we really, really, would love to be able to offer that same abilities that we had before."
In the meantime, the group is collecting donations at its website jcsda.com to help re-build its gear.
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