Corporal Kevin Crager with his dog, Mark, who is retiring from the Winter Springs Police Department after seven years on the job.
Mark will walk into a room full of colleagues on Feb. 27 and accept some well-earned admiration for his years of dedicated service to the Winter Springs Police force.
His retirement is a bittersweet milestone. Not getting up every morning, heading off to work with his partner and keeping the city safe will be a big adjustment, but Mark’s health isn’t what it once was and his doctors say it’s time to take a break.
Unlike most retirees though, Mark won’t be spending any time on the golf course or taking up any new hobbies. He won’t do much traveling. In fact, the backyard will do just fine for him.
Mark’s not a big fan of the finer things in life, but most dogs aren’t.
Mark, a 9-year-old German Shepherd, is one of two elite K-9s that the Winter Springs Police Department is retiring this year. The other, Rico, is retiring at the ripe old age of 12.
Mark has served Winter Springs side-by-side with his partner, Corporal Kevin Crager, for seven years. In that time, they have formed a unique bond born of their love of police work and each other.
Finding common ground wasn’t easy in the beginning though, Crager said.
“I’m not his first handler — there was a previous one and they just did not mesh well as a team,” he said. “Mark is very stubborn and set in his ways, and I tell people he has his rules. For probably the first month or so I didn’t know if we would be a team together.”
Before they first hit the streets, they spent 400 hours in training together, learning the skills necessary to work as an effective unit.
By now they are so good together, it seems almost as if Mark is reading Crager’s mind.
Like many great partnerships, the two communicate in their own language. In this case, it’s a combination of formal German commands, English words, body language and a smattering of police jargon that Mark interprets with incredible ease.
Mark is trained as a dual-purpose dog, meaning he is both a scent detection dog — in his case, explosives — and on patrol he is a locating tool, using his finely tuned sense of smell to track and locate suspects and the occasional missing person.
On one occasion, Crager said, they were tracking an autistic boy who had run away from home. The boy had gotten upset, packed a bag and left through his bedroom window. Mark quickly located the boy in a neighbor’s yard, and when Crager caught up to the pair, the boy was happily sharing his peanut butter crackers with the 100-pound police dog who was delighted to have found a new friend.
Not all of Mark’s stories are quite so heartwarming though. In the line of duty he has been kicked, punched and elbowed in the face. Following one particularly tough arrest, Mark had to have his spleen removed, possibly due to injuries he received.
Mark has even been credited with solving cases that had his human counterparts stumped.
Twice he was able to locate missing guns that were directly linked to cases that would not have been solved if the evidence had not been recovered.
One involved him searching a large field for a gun that had been overlooked by officers canvassing the area side-by-side.
“As the case went on through the night and into the next morning, we still couldn’t find it,” said Lieutenant Adam Egert. “The area was heavily wooded and we had no idea where to look exactly. The dog (Mark) made it a lot easier. He hit on the towel where the gun was hidden in less than half an hour.”
In another case, he found a gun hidden in a 30,000-square-foot warehouse.
Mark’s detection talents are well-known. Early in their career together he and Crager placed third out of 62 for efficiency and accuracy in explosive detection in a nationwide police dog competition.
Mark is one of only two certified explosive ordinance detection dogs in the county.
“His retirement is difficult for the force,” Winter Springs Police Chief Kevin Brunelle said.
None more so than for his partner.
“I never wanted to retire him,” Crager said. “I always imagined he would die doing what he loves best. Seeing him age is going to be really tough.”
Mark will stay with his partner and best friend at the home they share, but he hasn’t exactly agreed to give up his job just yet.
“He still thinks he is on duty, “ Crager said. “Even when the train goes by my house Mark thinks he needs to stop it and he really believes he can — that’s just the type of dog he is, he would do anything to protect the ones he loves.”
Mark’s work ethic matches his heart.
“I always say he never does anything 100 percent — for him it’s 200 percent every day.”
That’s what made it so hard when Mark’s vet diagnosed him with kidney disease in December.
“I choked up, learning that this might be it,” Crager said. “It was a bad day. I walked into the chief’s office and said ‘Mark’s done, we have to retire him’.”
“There was a lot of concern for Mark, knowing all that he has done for the community,” Brunelle said. “ It was heart-wrenching; Crager was tearing up, because, you know, that’s his buddy, his best friend.”