Police Dog’s Loss Hits Home for His Human Partner

Officer Ken Greenleaf catches himself talking into empty space these days.

He parks his cruiser while patrolling Redondo Beach and the command “Stay!” jumps out of his mouth before he realizes that his four-legged partner is no longer wagging his tail and waiting to hop out.

He glances over his shoulder at a stoplight expecting to see Basko’s eager, furry face, but the back seat is empty.

“I miss him badly. He was young, but he was about as perfect as a police dog can be,” said Greenleaf, who had been riding the streets and sharing his home with Basko for five years.

The dog’s accidental death Nov. 4 in Temecula at an annual police dog certification day came as a shock to his human colleagues, who will hold a memorial service Tuesday. It was doubly devastating for Greenleaf, who has been training police dogs in his spare time for 10 of his 27 years in law enforcement.

Basko died after biting through what was supposed to be a puncture-proof bag of nearly pure cocaine. The packet had been hidden under a refrigerator for dogs to sniff out during a training exercise. As his handler watched, Basko wedged his mouth under the refrigerator and grabbed his quarry with his teeth.

Greenleaf was startled when he heard the plastic-wrapped bag pop. “I told him to let go,” said the officer, who recalled racing over to inspect the dog’s mouth and nose. The cocaine had sprayed out the side of the bag opposite Basko’s mouth and spilled onto the floor. Greenleaf’s initial panic disappeared when he detected none of the powder on the dog.

Half an hour later, Basko went into convulsions while waiting in the officer’s car to head home. Greenleaf rushed him to an animal hospital, but the dog quickly succumbed to heart failure.

Greenleaf does not believe the death could have been prevented and was at a loss to suggest how the test could have been conducted more safely.

“This is the first time I’ve heard of this” happening, he said.

The officer has been putting together a video for the memorial service that will be held Tuesday at 5 p.m. in front of the Police Department.

Greenleaf has trained nine other police dogs, most of which have gone to Southern California law enforcement agencies. Basko, nearly 6 years old, was special because he caught on more quickly than most to the art of cornering crooks and sniffing out concealed narcotics.

In Basko’s first week on the job, he tracked down a murder suspect police had pursued into a Torrance residential neighborhood before vanishing. When Greenleaf and Basko arrived, the dog dashed past 15 houses, then suddenly stopped.

“His ears were up, his tail was up. We knew he was on to something,” Greenleaf said. They followed Basko into the garage and found him with all four paws planted firmly atop a pile of laundry, barking loudly.

“The guy was hiding under the clothes. We couldn’t see him, but Basko just stood on him,” Greenleaf recalled. “I hollered, ‘Let me see your hands, or my dog will bite you!’ The suspect poked his hands out right away.”

Police dogs by nature are highly disciplined. But Basko’s human colleagues found out one day just how hard it was to deter him from his work. During a narcotics search of a house, Basko pounced on a safe and began scratching and sniffing its cast-iron door to signal a find.

When officers walked over, they were surprised to find a hissing, snarling kitten just inches from Basko’s probing nose. The frightened creature had taken refuge in a space between the safe and a piece of furniture.

“Basko didn’t care about the cat,” Greenleaf said. “He kept doing his job. And it turned out the drugs were indeed in the safe.”

While trained to be menacing and focused, Basko was also known as a gentle, fun-loving dog. “If you were walking away and he wanted to play, he had this habit of poking your rear end with his nose to get your attention,” Greenleaf said.

And when it was time to work, he seemed to think of it as play.

“He understood that, when I put my uniform on, he got to ride in the police car,” Greenleaf said. “He really loved that.”