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54th ARS instructor pilot helps recover missing Oklahoma boy's body

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Leandra D. Stepp
  • 97 Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
ALTUS AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. --  It's a quiet, Thursday morning. The debris of what used to be homes and trees are scattered across the town. Dogs bark. Their leashes jingle as they run and intensely sniff their surroundings. Police radios and chatter hums in the background. The canines are focused and alert. They're on a search, a mission to find a missing 3-year-old boy.

Capt. Greg Auerbach, 54th Air Refueling Squadron KC-135 Stratotanker instructor pilot, was one of three K-9 Search and Rescue handlers that volunteers with the Central Oklahoma Search and Rescue who found the missing Piedmont, Okla. boy May 26, 2011.

According to www.newsok.com, 3-year-old Ryan Hamil was ripped out of a bathtub by a tornado, where he and his family huddled, and landed in a lake 60 yards away May 24.

Auerbach received the call for help from COSAR at 1 a.m. May 25 and immediately drove himself and his German Sheppard, Ronnie, more than 150 miles to Piedmont, Okla.

During the search for Ryan, he was acting as a safety observer, navigator and assistant for another volunteer handler when her dog showed interest in an area on the shore of the lake.

"I had only worked Ronnie to confirm what two other dogs had indicated on the shoreline," Auerbach said.

Three K-9 search dogs led volunteers to the body of the young boy but due to the large amount of debris in the water, the rescuers were not able to get to him. The winds shifted overnight and Ryan's lifeless body had drifted on the debris four feet from the shoreline of Falcon Lake.

Auerbach has been involved with search and rescue for 17 years, eight of those spent prior to joining the Air Force. He did not become a K-9 handler until 2009 while he was stationed at McConnell Air Force Base, Kan.

"Being in the military, it's hard to devote more than 200 hours a year to training but once you're involved in something like this, it motivates you, it makes you want to train harder," Auerbach said. You don't hope for disasters, you don't hope for missing people but you're waiting for that next call because you want to do as much as you can to help. Ideally you want to find everyone alive but that doesn't always happen. If you can bring someone home regardless, it brings closure and brings a conclusion to the story and that's why we do it. That's why I wake up at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning to drive two hours to Oklahoma City where the COSAR is based out of to go train weekly."

Training to be a certified search and rescue volunteer takes about a year of training. To train and certifying a K-9 dog takes one to two years.

Ronnie is trained as a live-find search dog. His training is built on a simple stimulus-response trigger. He was taught that no matter what he does, if he performs a specific set of behaviors leading Auerbach to the missing subject, he would get to play tug with his toy. That association is expanded through training so he, when instructed, will race through the wilderness to find a person so they can play tug with him.

"I was so proud of him." Auerbach said. "This is our first real-life test of our training. He passed."