A guy wanted on multiple charges had fled police in Harrison Township and the eventual car chase led to westbound US 35 near the Gettysburg Avenue exit.
As he was being stopped there, he jumped from his vehicle and began running back the way he’d come on 35. Soon a dozen officers were in pursuit but making no headway.
Then, suddenly, from the back of the pack, there came Scooby Doo — a 75-pound Belgian Malinois looking like Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt — and he roared past everyone.
When the suspect cut across the highway and jumped a guardrail, Scooby came flying over right behind him, pounced and finished the tackle with a good bite and then a grab and hold.
Although just one of the some 210 deployments in his nearly four-year K-9 career with the Dayton Police Department, it’s the best known, though there would be other assignments that brought more attention.
Often working alongside North, a Golden Labrador Retriever that was another of the eight, badge-carrying K-9s in the Dayton Police Department, Scooby Doo protected numerous area sporting events — especially University of Dayton basketball games — as well as several concert venues with headliners like Jelly Roll, Ringo Starr, Allison Krause and comedian Kevin Hart.
Wednesday night the phalanx of police officers who lined the walkway to a veterinary facility in Moraine and waited for Scooby Doo and his handler, Officer Nathan Speelman, to pass, knew much of the celebrated five-year-old dog’s resume.
But no one was quite ready for this.
This would be Scooby Doo’s last walk.
This past October, Speelman noticed a lump and swelling on one of Scooby’s hind legs.
He’d had another K-9 before this — a German Shepherd named Zeta who’d torn both ACL’s — so he said he initially thought Scooby had some tendon or ligament problem as well.
“That’s when they did a biopsy and found it was a mass cell tumor,” he said. “They started an aggressive form of chemotherapy, so he got a treatment every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and a chemo injection every other week.”
He said the oncologist suggested amputating the leg: “She said that’s the only way we can be sure we got it all.”
Checking first to see if the cancer had spread, they found it in his lymph nodes, liver and spleen so there was no point in removing the leg.
Early in December when we talked, Speelman said he thought his partner might have three months left.
But Scooby’s condition continued to worsen. He didn’t make it to the Flyers’ last two games before Christmas and early last week Speelman decided Scooby would be put to sleep on Friday.
When his six-year-old son Declan visited him from Columbus last weekend, Speelman told him it might be the last time he saw his pal Scooby.
“He adored Scooby and, I believe, Scooby adored him,” Speelman said. “And Declan understood, as well as a six-year-old could, that Scooby had cancer and was sick.”
The little boy begged to be able to come see Scooby once more and that was arranged with his mom early last Wednesday afternoon.
“When Scooby and I brought him back home, Declan finally asked me, ‘Is Scooby going to heaven now?’” Speelman said.
“And I told him, ‘Yes, Scooby’s going to heaven.’”
Back in Dayton Wednesday evening, Scooby’s condition deteriorated.
He had no energy, wouldn’t eat and couldn’t control his bodily functions. He suffered in silence and Speelman said he believes “dogs mask their pain to please or appease us.”
As the night wore on, he decided Scooby had endured enough. Before he took him to the vet, he sent a message out to other police officers in the area, telling them what was about to happen.
By the time he and Scooby started that final walk into the vet’s office, some 40 to 50 officers had assembled and offered a solemn and, in some cases, tearful salute.
‘It was a struggle’
As Zeta, his first dog, was getting close to retirement, Speelman began training Scooby Doo, who had come from Europe, where stricter breeding laws prevent the fight from being bred out of them.
“The two dogs were polar opposites,” he remembered.
“Zeta was very calm, docile. She wasn’t aggressive. She was great with kids and if you wanted to pet Zeta, she’d give you her belly.
“Scooby was more challenging.
“Being a Mal, they’re typically higher drive, more intense, and don’t want to play around.”
He said it was a struggle at times: “He was one of the more stubborn dogs we’ve trained.
“One of the things you have to do to pass the state test is to have the dog do recall.
“That’s extremely difficult when a dog sees a bite sleeve on a decoy and you tell him to go bite that guy and then halfway there you’re basically telling them: ‘No, just kidding! I need you to come back!’
“That’s important because if someone takes off running and then they see the dog and gives up, you’ve got to be able to bring your dog back and avoid the bite.
“But Scooby was so fast and so intense, it was a struggle.”
He said when Scooby heard them say recall, “he just refused to run at all.
“So, then we tried to trick him and use even numbers (between themselves) to signify a bite run and odd numbers for a recall.
“But I kid you not, Scooby learned the numbers and refused to move on an odd number. So, we really weren’t sure if he’d give us a recall to pass the test.”
Scooby did respond and in February of 2022, he was certified as an explosives detection and patrol canine who was also trained in ballistics recovery.
In celebration, Speelman scooped Scooby up and cradled him in his arms. It became one of the most heartwarming photos of Dayton K-9 partners ever taken.
‘The talk of the town’
The pair always had each other’s back.
Speelman told me of a time he pulled over a road rage driver who suddenly punched him in the face. Scooby entered the fray and got punched too, but then gave the guy a teeth-mark takedown.
Because Scooby and North, who is partnered with Detective Ross Nagy, are the only bomb sniffing dogs on the force, Speelman said they often were called from the West Dayton area they patrol to situations not just across the city, but in an eight-county area.
Speelman said something like 55 percent of Scooby’s deployments —about 115 — involved explosives.
Sixteen months ago, when the city of Springfield was targeted with bomb threats — thanks to bogus claims about Haitian residents by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance — they were called several times to help secure the schools and city hall.
When someone called in five bomb threats over a two-month period at the massive Caterpillar plant in Clayton, Scooby Doo, North and three more dogs were brought in each time to search the 1.5 million square feet of the complex.
“The places where calls come from can be so random,” Speelman once told me. “We went to bomb threats at the Harem Strip Club on N. Dixie, Panera Bread in Beavercreek and the Kroger store in Kettering.”
Scooby Doo was assigned to protect Vance on a trip to Southwest Ohio in 2024 and every year he works the Wright Sate commencement.
This past summer he and the other dogs patrolled the NATO Summit in downtown Dayton.
Sports assignments often are a respite from the pressures and violence the handlers and their dogs face in their daily police work.
And Scooby Doo’s sports resume was impressive.
He and North always could be found at the back entrance of UD Arena for every Flyers men’s basketball game. They would sniff the bags and belongings that came in with players of both teams, the referees, cheerleaders, bands and media.
They worked the First Four, scouring the Arena and surrounding grounds from the predawn darkness until past midnight.
Scooby Doo worked backstage at the Nutter Center’s WWE shows, where you sometimes found the over-muscled comic book heroes fawning over him like they were little kids.
Each fall, he patrolled Cincinnati Bearcats football games and the Air Force Marathon. Last June he ensured safety at the FIFA Club World Cup soccer tournament in Cincinnati.
“The thing people always ask Ross and me about our dogs is, ‘Did you ever find any explosives?’” Speelman said.
“And we can say, ‘No we never found anything, but more importantly we haven’t missed anything.’”
While Scooby Doo didn’t find anything at these venues, he did once leave a surprise package of sorts at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.
He and Speelman were brought in to patrol the grounds for four days surrounding a preseason NFL game there.
On the last day, Speelman mentioned he hadn’t yet seen the fabled gallery of Hall of Fame busts and was told to take Scooby and tour the area:
“So, I start going through the most sacred room of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the next thing I know, Scooby pops a squat and takes a big dump right there.
“People took out their cameras and immediately we become the talk of the town.”
Heaven can wait
While the Hall of Fame wasn’t upset about Scooby Doo’s gift, Speelman said some visiting teams that come into UD Arena take offense that the dogs are inspecting their bags:
“Some make a big deal about it and we get complaints. I don’t know if they think we are looking for drugs or just wasting their time, but it’s not that.”
On the flip side, there is Obi Toppin, who is everybody’s friend at UD Arena — except some of those opposing teams in the past — and he is especially drawn to the police dogs at the back entrance.
“That’s back when I had Zeta and he’d come out and pet her and we’d just talk,” Speelman said.
“He’d talk about where he wanted to be drafted. What his first car would be. Everything.
“He’s just a good guy and he loved the dogs.”
Back then, Speelman told him if he ever got a second dog he was naming him Obi:
“And he was like, ‘Oh man, I’d really appreciate that.’
“But then I got Scooby and he already had the name and I thought, ‘Man, what a catchy name for a police dog — Scooby Doo!’
“So then Obi comes back last month to be inducted in the Hall of Fame and he comes to see the dogs and I tell him, ‘Well, this is my new dog, but his name is Scooby Doo.’
“He said, ‘That’s OK. That’s a good name and a good-looking dog.’
“He’s still the same person he was when he was here, even if he is making millions now. And that’s why I said, ‘No matter what, my next dog will be called Obi.’”
The tough thing is that Speelman didn’t think that could happen so soon:
“Originally, I thought Scooby and I would retire together five years from now.”
Everything is topsy-turvy now.
The mornings used to have a pattern to them. Speelman said he dressed for work first and once he put on his bulletproof vest and gun belt, Scooby stood ready for his bulletproof vest, too.
During the day they often stopped at Children’s Hospital.
“They have an EMS room where first responders and police officers and fire fighters can go for a soft drink or a snack,” Speelman said.
“They have this one thing called Flower, Broccoli, Carrots and Tomatoes — a vegetable plate — and Scooby loved them. He’d head straight to the refrigerator and the people who worked there would go, ‘Oh, Scooby’s here for his veggies.’”
Next Friday the pair would have been at the back door of UD Arena for the Flyers game with Loyola.
Speelman said he might stop by that night, but then again the sense of loss might be too much.
Trying to find some kind of positive, he’s helped the Dayton Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #44 Foundation launch a GoFundMe page that will provide finances for other police dogs who retire and have medical issues whose costs — Scooby’s were $2,000 a month — must be absorbed by the handlers once the animals no longer are working for the city.
If that takes off, it may ease some of the hurt Speelman feels now.
The other night his last words to his beloved partner were: “I love you Scooby. I love you.”
As he remembered that farewell, the emotion swelled and his voice broke.
“Now there’s just this ginormous void,” he finally said. “I’ve had a police dog the last 11 years. It’s like, ‘What do I do now? What’s my purpose? How do I move forward?’”
If only he could move backward.
Heaven can wait.
As he walked out of the vet’s door, he wished there had been one more chance for a recall.
DONATE
The Dayton Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #44 Foundation has launched a GoFundMe page to provide funding for active and retired police K9s that may need medical assistance. To donate, log on to: gofundme.com/f/dayton-fop-foundation
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