When Kiziah Goodwin’s car was found in a rural corner of Calhoun County, law enforcement was at a loss. The 78-year-old woman, suffering from dementia, and had driven away from her home in Eastover two days before.
Now all investigators had to go on was a car and part of a shoe.
After searching all afternoon and into the night, law enforcement hadn’t found anything, said Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott.
But the next morning, Hammer, a 4-year-old Czech Shepherd, arrived at the scene. The Richland County sheriff’s new hire sniffed the shoe and took off, said Lott, leading investigators right to Goodwin, who was leaned up against a tree in the July heat.
“There was no way she would’ve survived that day,” said Lott. “The dog saved her.”
Hammer is one of four new K-9 units specialized in finding people and human remains that the Richland County Sheriff’s Department has added to its team. The new dogs bring the total number of K-9 units at the department up to 22.
They’ll be adding to a team that already features a therapy dog and K-9s that specialize in detecting guns, bombs and electronic devices.
“We were missing human remains detection,” said Lott. “This is making our department even better.”
The dogs came to the Richland Sheriff’s Department along with their trainer and handler, Michel Galliot.
Galliot, who has been training shepherds in search and rescue and forensic detection for 10 years, was also deployed with his dogs to help locate the body of Alisa Woods, who disappeared on May 9. Woods’ boyfriend, Matthew Drennan confessed to killing Woods and burying her in a Newberry County forest. While Drennan gave investigators a rough location for the burial site, it was Galliot and his dogs who ultimately found Woods.
“The family needs to have some closure,” said Lott. “With these new dogs, we can do that.”
While Galliot has been working with law enforcement for over five years, he and his dogs joined the Richland County Sheriff’s Department at the beginning of the summer. They’ve proved to be “immediately valuable” in a short time, said Lott.
Galliot is a certified master trainer with the American Society of Canine Trainers International. Along with Hammer, his three other dogs, Nikita, Shadow, and Rex, are all certified by the association.
Dogs specializing in human remains detection, also called cadaver dogs, began being used by law enforcement in the 1970s, according to the American Kennel Club. Dogs have about 200 million to 300 million scent receptors in their noses, compared to around 6 million in a human’s. The scent regions of their brains are approximately 40 times larger than a human’s.
“They’re no different than our regular deputies,” said Lott. “They just happen to have four legs on them.”
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