Countywide : Being On Track Has Its Rewards

It’s midnight and the phone rings, awakening Orange County sheriff’s reserve Lt. Lawrence R. Harris.

He is being summoned to help out on a case. It could be almost anything: a lost child or a possible kidnaping or an escapee.

Harris, 64, grabs his uniform. As he dresses, his wife, Jean, picks up a map book and outlines the area he will search with his two bloodhounds, Sable and Duchess. Harris departs quickly into the unpredictable night, his dogs in tow.

The scene is repeated night after night for the retired McDonnell Douglas engineer, who, according to the Sheriff’s Department, puts in more hours on the job than a paid deputy. He is on call 24 hours a day. For the past six years, he and his bloodhounds have lived this life, and they love it, Harris said.

“The most natural high you could possibly acquire is to find a lost child,” he said, giving his dogs all the credit. Bloodhounds have a purpose in life, he said. They are meant to find people, and that’s what Harris wants everyone to know.

Harris was recently accorded the highest honor in the state for a reserve officer when he was given a Meritorious Service Award for outstanding performance in his 32 years of volunteer work.

Clocking in 2,157 hours of service in 1991, Harris exceeded the average full-time paid sheriff’s deputy by more than 100 hours. And he does it for free.

“He’s absolutely tremendous,” Sheriff’s Lt. Dick Olson said. “It’s a tremendous benefit to the taxpayers of Orange County to have him with us, especially with the expertise that he has with the bloodhounds.”

Harris started as a reserve captain in the California Department of Fish and Game in 1960. In 1968, he became a reserve officer at the Newport Beach Police Department. He moved to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in 1983. Three years later, he took in a purebred bloodhound from the county’s jail, where inmates used to care for it. It was then that Harris realized his calling.

To do their job, Harris said, bloodhounds need to bond with their handlers. Since the day he decided Duchess and Sable would live with him and his wife, they became part of the family.

Their portraits adorn the walls in the Harris home next to the pictures of the kids and grandchildren. Their droopy mugs fill the pages of the family albums.

Helping to solve a case by finding a missing person or fleeing suspect gives Harris great pride in his dogs. But he also wants to spend more time telling people about what his bloodhounds can do. “They can’t perform miracles,” he said, “but last year, they solved 32% of the baffling missing persons calls they were sent on.

“Finding the person is the icing on the cake,” Harris said. “So many times it’s what the dogs contribute to the case that is the cake itself. Their reward is finding the person. They were born to find people.”

Sara Landa has Sable to thank for finding her after she was kidnaped from her aunt and uncle at a Laundromat in Santa Ana last year. Sable followed the girl’s scent seven miles to a third-floor apartment, where the then-2-year-old was safely rescued, Harris said.

“I’m so proud of them,” said Jean Harris, 58, who is herself a reserve officer in the Newport Beach Police Department. “I just wish we would have started with the dogs 30 years ago.”