Kathy Ferrara reviews a scrapbook of her volunteer career as a search team member with students of Brookfield High School.
This story is part of a series on the 2024 inductees into the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame.
When you have a pet dog, it’s expensive enough with the food, vet bills and toys. Kathy Yazvac Ferrara has extra expenses – we’re talking thousands of dollars of extra expenses – to train and maintain the certifications for her 11-year-old German shepherd, Lucia, a search and rescue dog. The cost of insurance alone is $2,400 a year.
Ferrara, a founding member of K-9 Searching out Scent, has had four dogs over 25 years that have found 10 missing people alive and made 10 recoveries of bodies or human remains – two body recoveries in water, one body recovery on land, four human remains detections on land and three human remains detections in burned structures. It’s a service she and her K-9 SOS partner Chris Gantler offer for free.
“These dogs have been very good for our community because they help people that need help,” said Ferrara, who was honored by the Brookfield trustees in August for her 25 years of service. “That’s why we do this, to help people. When you’re returning someone’s loved one, whether they’re alive or not, it’s a very rewarding thing to do.”
Kathy Ferrara sets Lucia loose to hunt for human remains at a demonstration at the 2022 Brookfield Safety Awareness Night.
Ferrara, a 1974 Brookfield High grad and life-long resident of Brookfield, has had German shepherds starting when she was 4, when her uncle brought one from Germany. She was well into her 32-year career as a teacher, primarily of special needs students, at Girard schools when she decided to go into search and rescue. Her second career started when she was on a Brookfield schools field trip with her daughter and chatted with the bus driver, a Farrell policeman.
“He told about somebody that did this,” she said. “He gave me his (John Libonati’s) phone number.”
Libonati, the current Mercer County coroner, had started a search group in Pittsburgh.
“I was driving to Pittsburgh after work every day to train with a group of people to learn the ropes,” Ferrara said. “I didn’t have a dog. I wanted to make sure this was something I wanted to do before I put a lot of time and money into it. I was field support. We went out and hid for the dogs, and then the dogs would find you.”
She got a dog, Shaman, and traded in her car for an SUV to better carry him around and started training. It takes 18 months to two years to train a search dog, and certifications are done yearly through the North American Police Work Dog Association or every two years through the International Police Work Dog Association.
But, certification is not the end of training. Ferrara takes Lucia, her fourth search dog, out every week for training sessions, and there are regular conferences and other outside training opportunities.
“I knew I had found my passion when I had my first dog,” she said. “He was amazing.”
“I’ve always loved dogs and I am a people person. I thought it was a good way to combine the two things to do community service. We didn’t have anything like that in our area.”
Chris Gantler, left, and Kathy Ferrara are the only remaining human members of K9 SOS, a non-profit group search and rescue team.
The call for help with searches has come from police departments, fire departments, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the FBI and coroners, often in the middle of the night.
Lucia is trained to find people in the wilderness, urban settings, rubble, buildings, vehicles, water and disaster areas, and who are buried. She does not hunt for criminals on the loose, and doesn’t search for drugs or bombs or do arson detection.
“Our dogs work for a reward,” Ferrara said. “They’ll do anything for that toy.”
To keep up with Lucia, Ferrara bikes 10 miles every day and walks the dog two miles every day.
“Just gonna keep doing it until she (Lucia) can’t do it anymore and then I guess I’ll retire,” Yazvac said.
You can find K-9 Searching Out Scent on Facebook.
