Nothing will eclipse the dogged double team of North and Scooby Doo.
They are the two Dayton Police Department K-9s who are assigned to Flyers’ games this season.
North is a 4-year-old yellow Labrador Retriever who is partnered with his handler, Detective Ross Nagy, who also works with the drug unit.
Scooby Doo, a 4-year-old Belgian Malinois, is teamed with Patrol Officer Nathan Speelman.
The four-legged defenders are stationed at the Arena’s back entrance, checking the bags of visiting teams, media, cheerleaders and other groups that come in.
They get other sports assignments as well, especially at the First Four. Speelman and Scooby and his previous dog, Zeta, have done college and pro games in Cincinnati. And both North and Scooby patrol all the WWE events at the Nutter Center.
Speelman and Scooby were assigned to Vice President J.D. Vance’s detail when he came back home to southwest Ohio recently. Both dogs patrol Wright State graduations, the annual Country Concert in Fort Loramie and, at the artist’s request, they’ve worked many local shows, including Ringo Starr at the Fraze and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss at the Rose.
But their main work is their police duties.
A few months ago, when the city of Springfield was targeted with bomb threats — thanks to bogus claims by now President Donald Trump and Vance that Haitian residents were eating people’s pets — they were called several times to help secure schools and city hall.
When someone called in five bomb threats in two months at the massive Caterpillar plant in Clayton, they and three more dogs were brought in each time to search the entire 1.5 million square feet of the complex.
“The places where calls come from can be so random,” Speelman said. “We went to bomb threats at the Harem Strip Club on N. Dixie, Panera Bread in Beavercreek and the Kroger store in Kettering.
“You don’t realize how big those Kroger stores are and all the places you have to search. That one was hard.”
Nagy started to laugh: “Yeah, and you go down the dog toy aisle and all of a sudden your dog is more worried about picking up a squeaky ball.”
The Dayton Police Department has eight K-9s. Seven are either German Shepherds or Belgian Malinois — all of them coming from places like Germany, Netherlands and the Czech Republic, where stricter lineage laws have not let the fight drive to be bred out of them like in America.
North is the outlier of the bunch.
“He comes from the mean streets of Iowa,” Nagy grinned.
“Someone decided we needed a Lab, and they reached out to a trainer we deal with in Canton. He sent a feeler out and a guy from Iowa said he had a Lab, which ended up being North.
“When we got him I happened to look at his paperwork and found he’d been adopted from the humane society. He was a stray in Iowa.”
Now he’s a star. He’s great at finding everything from explosives, guns and spent shells to lost kids and dementia patients.
He’s not a bite dog who chases down criminals. Scooby Doo is and Speelman took out his phone and showed me a video of his partner in action last March.
A guy had fled officers in Harrison Township and his car finally was halted near the Gettysburg exit on US 35. He jumped from his vehicle and made a mad dash down the highway, pursued by 12 officers who weren’t gaining much ground.
But suddenly from the back of the pack, there came Scooby Doo — looking like Usain Bolt − as he roared past everyone. When the suspect cut across the highway and jumped a guardrail, Scooby Doo came flying over right behind him and pounced on him.
He finished the takedown with a good bite and then a grab and hold.
Most of the time, when that happens, a suspect will submit. But there are some people who still try to fight.
Last year Speelman commandeered a road rage suspect who had just shot up another car: “He punched me in the face and then started punching and kicking Scooby.”
That got him additional charges.
“Yeah, I believe it can be a fourth-degree felony for assaulting one of our dogs,” Speelman said. “They are police officers, too. They have badges.”
They also have the utmost respect of their fellow officers for their bravery, their tenacity and their skill to do what humans cannot.
A couple of months ago – on a Sunday a little before noon – a 21-year-old guy and a couple of teenagers were attempting their second home invasion of the morning. They all had guns. But this time the homeowner shot through the door and hit the older guy.
“When we took them all into custody, they had no guns,” Nagy said.
“Twenty-somethings with guns are scary, but at least they have some life experience. It’s the young ones – guys 16 and 17 – who are the scariest. They have no perspective. Life to them has no real meaning. They do stuff no adult would do.”
The police needed to find those guns and some 90 minutes later – in 30 degree weather and pouring rain – North found all the hidden weapons. Nagy said the worst part of the job is the continuing violence, “the pure evil you see.”
And that’s why the forays into sports can be a real respite.
Obi Toppin, the UD star now with the Indiana Pacers, loved the dogs.
And Nagy told how the WWE wrestlers — all those musclebound comic book type characters — turned into fawning admirers of the dogs back stage.
He has a photo of the cocky WWE star LA Knight sitting in the ring like an overjoyed kid with North and two other dogs.
‘Adrenaline rush’
I first met Speelman 10 years ago at a Monday Night Football game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Houston Texans at Paul Brown Stadium. He was in uniform and accompanied by his German Shepherd partner Zeta.
He remembers that meeting: “You said, ‘Dayton police! What are you doing here? And I was like, ‘I really can’t tell you.’”
He could now.
The game was being held three days after coordinated attacks by Islamic terrorists in Paris killed 130 people and left 416 injured. The NFL feared similar attacks and extra protection was called in.
“If a drone landed on the field or somewhere in the stadium, our job was to check it out and see if it had explosives,” he said.
This was right around the time Speelman had become a K-9 handler after nine years on the force.
After graduating from Stebbins High and then Wright State with a management information systems degree, he had no plans for law enforcement work until he did several ride-alongs with his friend since kindergarten, Tedd Trupp, who was a Dayton police officer.
“I was with him the day two Trotwood officers were shot,” Speelman said. “One of their cars was stolen and we went looking for it.
“There was that adrenaline rush, and I said, “Holy crap! You get paid for this?’ Once I got the first taste of police work, I wanted more.”
It was similar for Nagy, who, at 41, is two years younger than Speelman.
He graduated from Miamisburg High and was at Miami University, studying business, when he accompanied a friend in the sheriff’s office on his shift.
“It was all the fun things of being on a sports team – the camaraderie – only with other officers,” he said.
He ended up graduating from UD and after a couple of years he joined the Dayton Police Department and spent 11 years with the SWAT team
Now a detective with the drug unit, he became a K-9 handler three years ago and now says: “It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done. I wish I would’ve done it seven or eight years ago. There’s nothing better than going to work with your best friend. You can’t have a bad day with your dog.”
Maybe so, but you can have an “Oh no!” moment or two.
When Nagy first brought North to UD Arena for an introductory visit before the First Four, he was taking him across the catwalk at the top of the Arena when North suddenly stopped, squatted and did his business.
“He was new and just getting used to different food and he had this runny diarrhea,” Nagy said shaking his head at the memory. “It ended up landing on six or seven seats down below. And so, for the next hour, I was down there cleaning it up.”
Speelman laughed and offered similar story from when the Hall of Fame weekend at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.
After two days patrolling the grounds with Scooby Doo, he asked if he could see the hallowed Hall of Fame Gallery that holds a bronze bust of every player who has been enshrined.
He was given access and the next thing he knows, “Scooby is taking a (crap) in the most sacred room there! And, of course, everybody pulled out their phones and took photos.”
In this case every picture did not tell a story…at least not the one that matters most when it comes to Scooby, North and all the rest of K-9s and their handlers.
Along with all the apprehensions, bomb and drug missions and people searches, there are the countless untold involvements and good deeds they do beyond their immediate job.
A while back when he was with SWAT, Nagy went to Ukraine to teach their officers better policing tactics.
A few years ago, he was featured with his wife — now Lt. Col. Kelly Nagy, who is a physician at the 88th Medical Group — at the AFMC Women’s Leadership Symposium at Wright-Patterson AFB to educate Airmen on the importance of developing, supporting and retaining female leaders.
When a young boy on Dayton’s West Side — where Speelman and Scooby Doo now ride patrol — had his lawnmower stolen by toughs who wanted to ruin his neighborhood mowing business, Speelman bought him a replacement mower.
Then there was the young Dayton boy — a respectful kid with a good heart, Speelman said — who was going through a bumpy patch with his single-parent mom, who asked if he’d speak to her son.
He did more than that. He paid for the boy to go to football camps, went to his high school games and took him on college visits.
That young man became a college star.
In 2022, Speelman received the Steve Whalen Memorial Policing Award, which recognizes a Dayton Police officer who demonstrates extraordinary commitment and service to the community.
‘Ball is life’
One wintry morning a couple of weeks ago, I joined the Dayton K-9 unit for a training session at the long-closed Black Lane Elementary School in Fairborn. It once held 315 students, but today the classrooms — with the fading work of students still up on the walls — are empty and the playground equipment is deserted.
It’s the perfect place for the handlers and their dogs to hunt for explosives, confront “bad guys” and scour the snow-covered expanse in back for discarded weapons and shell casings.
Weaving past an old rusting backboard, the unused slide and into the nearby bushes, North found each piece of weaponry hidden earlier that morning. He’d sit down next to it and anxiously await his reward: A ball on a rope Nagy tossed to him
“To him — ball is life,” Nagy said.
Meanwhile, the other dogs were taking turns bolting into the school to subdue other padded police officers pretending to be criminals.
Nagy said they are required to train their dogs 16 hours a month, but because they are all so “high drive, high energy,” they usually try to do something with them every day.
The biweekly sessions at the school not only showcase the skills of the dogs, but the camaraderie of the eight handlers.
Finally, North was brought onto the second floor of the school where a variety of explosives – small amounts of things like C-4, TNT, dynamite and RDX – were hidden in different rooms.
With each search, North entered a room, raised his nose high to take in the myriad scents and then began circling, weaving and working himself past every inch of space until he found the threat.
This was training he’d put to use at UD Arena next month when the NCAA teams, national media and thousands of fans come in for the First Four.
He and Scooby Doo will begin those searches hours before dawn each morning and keep up their defenses until the dribbling stops and the lights go out after midnight.
“The biggest thing about Ross and I and our dogs is that people won’t know we’re even there,” Speelman said. “And the best part, if somebody asks, we can tell them, ‘No, we haven’t found anything. But more importantly, we haven’t missed anything.’”
No defense at UD Arena is better than that.
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