The two-year veteran of the ATF uses her nose to find shell casings, ammunition, bullet fragments and weapons in thick brush at night sometimes 100 to 200 yards away.
The benefit for local agencies is that Opey and David McMullen, her ATF special agent canine handler, work out of the Dayton police Safety Building. While she’s worked the Kentucky Derby, Indianapolis 500, the 2016 Republican National Convention and other big events, Opey spends most of her time searching for evidence in Montgomery County.
Opey’s track record includes helping solve important crimes and sweeping areas for explosives such as at the apartment of the Cincinnati Fifth Third Center triple-homicide suspect.
“She’s a highly trained tool,” said McMullen, who who trains one of 34 of the agency’s bomb dogs. “There’s a lot of time, money and energy that goes into training her. So I don’t want to keep that up on the wall and just go to big events every now and again.
“We’re capable of doing that and we do that, but we want to put it into the field and put it to work and hopefully reduce violent crime.”
From dog to database
The evidence Opey finds gets entered into the ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) system. That is a database of digital images of spent bullets found at crime scenes or test-fired from confiscated weapons.
“The dog is a huge tool for NIBIN. … Every gun has a fingerprint and the shell casings have become really relevant evidence,” said McMullen, who has an office in the Safety Building where he works with Dayton police.
Opey has had a role in solving several crimes — once finding two weapons next to $1,000 cash after human officers couldn’t find anything in an abandoned field and wooded area.
Opey also found the lone shell casing from an Oct. 24 Dayton homicide during which the victim was shot in the chest with a .45-caliber weapon.
Beyond being an Explosive Detection Canine (EDC), Opey also is a Search Enhanced Evidence K-9 (S.E.E.K.), one of about only 15 in the ATF, McMullen said.
Named for a town in Alabama and raised in the University of Auburn’s Explosive Detection Canine breeding program, Opey graduated from the ATF’s 25-week program in June 2016.
“Most bomb dogs they do the higher odors and they’re looking for explosives, but she’s actually a trace evidence dog,” McMullen said of Opey’s skill at finding small shell casings. “If you couldn’t see it or find it, she would search and hunt for it with her nose and find that very low odor.”
Working for food
The reward for finding any explosive odor is dog food from a pouch McMullen wears, along with a “Good girl” encouragement.
“Opey loves to eat,” McMullen said. “It’s fun for her. She enjoys the hunt, the search, but the reward is to get fed.”
Opey gets weekly weigh-ins to make sure she stays around her goal of 80 pounds. Independence Day is a challenge.
“There is a lot of fireworks residue and she alerts to it as trained,” McMullen said. “She gets fed a lot. We’ll just be walking and she’ll smell something, sit and look at me like, ‘Hey, Dad, I found something’ and of course, I’m going to feed her because she’s doing her job.”
McMullen led Opey in finding explosive substances during a demonstration for the Dayton Daily News and showed how he directs and stops her with voice commands, hand signals and a whistle.
“I align her with my hand,” he said. “She picks out the target whether it’s an object and I send her to it and she’ll go to it. She’ll search it and if she finds something, she’ll sit down, indicate to let me know and I’ll recall her. … If a car is coming, I have to be able to stop her.”
‘She loves the job’
McMullen said he was an ATF agent in Detroit and Dayton for more than 15 years before becoming a special agent canine handler.
“I love dogs. I love working with dogs,” he said. “I had hunting dogs growing up and I just enjoy it.”
Opey lives with McMullen’s family and does get to play fetch — “she goes crazy for the ball” — swim and nap by the television.
But Opey is on call 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year.
“On weekends if I just do some basic training to keep her fed, she’s bored,” McMullen said. “We walk in the police department and she’s so happy. She loves the job.”
So does McMullen, who admitted he wanted a new challenge.
“It’s fun. I enjoy it,” he said. “Especially with the police department, I’m very active. It’s not uncommon for them to call me on the dispatch radio to come do a search.”
McMullen said Dayton police officers love Opey as much as the children she meets during school demonstrations.
“They just come from all over the building,” he said. “You see all these tough, veteran police officers just talking like a baby to her.”
Training for the future
Opey undergoes an annual two-day test that includes field, car and package searches for explosive odor recognition. The test run by an ATF chemist includes rare homemade explosive substances.
“As an examiner, it’s stressful because it’s like your dog cannot make a mistake,” McMullen said. “They have to hit 100 percent positive on all the odors.”
McMullen said Opey is ATF property but when she retires she will live with him even if he gets a new ATF working dog.
McMullen said ATF dogs have mandatory retirement at 10 years old and many work at least until 8 depending on health and performance.
McMullen anticipates Opey has thousands of explosives to detect — and thousands of meals to eat — before hanging up her gold ATF badge.
“My goal is to continually elevate her game,” he said. “So, in two years from now, I’m hoping that she’s even better than she is now.
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OPEY’S RECENT HITS
ATF K-9 Opelika or “Opey” has helped many recent gun-related crimes. Here are a few mentioned by her handler, ATF Special Agent David McMullen:
• June 21, 2018: Opey found a .45 caliber shell casing at a shooting at a park in Cincinnati. The casing matched a gun found in a vehicle stopped by police a few miles away. The case is pending indictment.
• Sept. 6, 2018: Opey conducted a search warrant at the residence of the active shooter of the Fifth/Third building in Cincinnati, where three men were killed. Opey and McMullen swept the apartment for any explosive devices, finding two boxes of ammunition in a plastic storage bin and gun cleaning supplies in a garbage can.
• Aug. 23, 2018: Dayton PD made a drug arrest on Dunbar and Dakota street recovering narcotics. Officers were unable to locate any firearms in an abandoned field and wooded area. Opey found two pistols with extended magazines and $1,000 cash in a thick patch of brush in a wooded area. The case is pending indictment waiting for DNA and other lab results.
• Oct. 24, 2018: A homicide victim at 450 Forest Ave. in Dayton was shot once in the chest, but officers and detectives didn't locate any shell casings. Opey located a .45 caliber shell casing in the grass nearby where the victim's body was found. An arrest was made and police learned the suspect used a .45 caliber pistol to shoot the victim.
• Dec. 13, 2018: Opey found .223 shell casings in the street on Woodlake Dr. where a house twice was shot up. NIBIN analysis showed the casings recovered by Opey matched two other shootings in Dayton. The case is still under investigation.
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