Dog Sniffs for Clues in Sears Outlet Fire

Her black nose skimming the charred rubble, Lucy the arson-detecting dog sniffed her way across the wreckage of the Sears outlet building in Simi Valley on Tuesday.

A day after a suspicious fire destroyed what was left of the earthquake-damaged building, Lucy’s handler, Oxnard Fire Chief Randy Coggan, was called to bring in the highly trained chocolate Labrador to hunt for signs of arson.

The building had sat vacant and ruined since the January, 1994, Northridge earthquake because its owners refuse to fix it without a tenant to occupy it. Initial investigations indicate the fire was either set accidentally from transients using the building for shelter or deliberately by an arsonist.

Together, man and dog scouted the ruins for traces of flammable liquid that might bolster county arson investigators’ theory that someone deliberately torched the building Monday before dawn.

Lucy--who came to Ventura County six months ago when the Oxnard Fire Department hired Coggan away from Redmond, Wash.--can detect whiffs of a dozen different fluids used by firebugs, said Coggan.

“Everything from light to heavy,” Coggan said. “She’ll go from acetone to diesel fuel.”

Lucy stopped sniffing and looked at Coggan. “Where?” he asked. She looked down, then at him again, and sat in place.

“Show me,” he commanded. Lucy stood, scratched the ashes, then sat again.

With that, Coggan tossed Lucy a rolled-up towel and played tug-of-war with her for a couple minutes to reward her for sniffing out something suspicious.

Later, county Arson Investigator Dave Chovanec and a corps of firefighters dug up samples of rubble she had pointed out and took it to the county Crime Lab for analysis.

Chovanec said he once refused to believe in “voodoo stuff” like arson dogs. Then he began working with them. After a dog in a lab test picked out the faintest smear of gasoline on a hat buried beneath a sofa--a trace so small that chemical-detecting machines could not pick it up--he was convinced, Chovanec said.

Lucy has worked only four cases in Ventura County including the Sears outlet fire, Coggan said. But in Washington, she worked on 25 cases over 18 months. She sniffed out evidence in those cases that helped prosecutors win convictions against three arsonists, he said.

“This is pretty much an average scene for her,” Coggan said as Lucy lapped water from a blue bowl during a break.

Then, man and dog went back to work.