Suffolk's newest K-9 investigator sniffing the county for explosive clues

Suffolk County’s newest investigator spent a year behind bars, but rest assured his partner says Jimmy is "a very good boy."

Jimmy, a 17-month yellow Lab, and the county’s latest accelerant-sniffing dog, has assisted Suffolk fire marshals on eight arson cases during the highly trained dog's first month on the job.

With training courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — much of it in a prison dog training program — Jimmy helps Suffolk County Fire Marshal Aaron Rombough find trace amounts of charcoal lighter fluid, gasoline, kerosene and other ignitable liquids. He's the county’s eighth explosive detection K-9 in its nearly 35-year partnership with the ATF, which county officials tout as the longest-running collaboration of its kind in the country.

"If he finds something, he’ll sit right down and then we mark it," said Rombough, Jimmy's handler, of the dog's work at crime scenes. "Then we come back through later on and dig up that stuff and send it to the crime lab to be analyzed."

Puppies Behind Bars

Jimmy spent most of the first 12 months of his life in one of seven state prisons where Puppies Behind Bars trains pups for careers as service dogs or working companions for veterans and first responders, Rombough said. The Manhattan-based nonprofit pairs the young dogs with prisoners, who are responsible for raising the puppies through obedience training, according to its website. After they learn the basics for a year, the pups leave prison and are matched with trainers who continue working with the dogs and preparing them for their eventual partners, like Rombough.

When the two first met, Rombough said, Jimmy "was barreling to get to the odors. Once he picks up the odor, he’s gone, he’s going to it."

Since Nov. 8, Jimmy's first day on the job, the yellow Lab has unleashed superior sniffing skills on eight different crime scenes to detect flammable liquids "buried in that fire debris or in the walls or wherever it could be," Rombough said.

Jimmy is requested by a lead investigator — generally a Suffolk County Police Arson Squad detective or a local municipality’s fire marshal — as a time- and effort-saving tool to "determine what could be part of the origin and cause of that fire," he added.

After Jimmy sits down by a scent he had picked up, crime scene personnel scrape up samples "to be analyzed by the crime lab just to confirm," Rombough said. When K-9s are on the case to accurately pinpoint concentrated areas with accelerants, he added, investigators send fewer samples to the crime lab "so that we don’t have a backlog of ... mountains of evidence."

Different dogs, different uses

First responders around the country use dogs for different purposes — such as detecting drugs, locating suspects or missing persons — all of which requires unique training, Brian Higgins, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Newsday. While dogs seeking a person often are given an article of clothing with traces of that human’s scent, arson dogs have the smells of various flammable materials "imprinted" in their brains through their rigorous training, and can detect any one of them at a scene, he said.

"When you imprint a specific scent, like an accelerant, on a dog, the dog isn’t affected by outside influences. It’s not smelling other stuff ... They’re not as easily distracted," said Higgins, a former police chief of Bergen County, New Jersey.

Nassau and Suffolk counties are home to two of around 50 teams nationwide that handle ATF-trained K-9s, according to the federal agency’s website. The two Long Island teams work together if one is overwhelmed with service calls or if they are currently training a new dog, said Rudy Sunderman, commissioner of Suffolk County Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services. Chuck, a previous Suffolk County K-9, now works in Nassau. Among other cases, Chuck sniffed out gasoline samples submitted as evidence that led to the trial conviction of Amanda Burnside, of East Quogue. Burnside was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Feb. 27 for attempting to set fire to three Hampton Bays houses, succeeding in one of the efforts.

"The ATF provides the training for the handler and the dog to Suffolk County at no cost to the taxpayers," Sunderman said. "We are actually trying to get a second K-9 right now."

At home, these highly trained animals are like any other household pet. Jimmy, very much like an overgrown puppy, loves to play fetch with his ball, but frightens Rombough’s smaller 13-year-old schnauzer, Smokey, when he tries to play with him. On Monday afternoon, when the fire marshal noted Jimmy was in a particularly playful mood, he nibbled on a plant in Sunderman’s office before getting some fresh air and chewing up a stick.

"He comes home with me, he’s a normal dog," Rombough added. "The only thing is ... he’s training everyday."