Another 'What Were They Thinking?' - The Loyal Dog Edition

A dog can be man's best friend; it can also lead police to your hiding place.

Back in early November of last year, two parolees and a German shepherd inside a vehicle were stopped around 7:30 a.m. by a State Trooper in the state of Oregon. As the officer approached the Chevy SUV occupied by the parolees and the dog on foot, the vehicle took off.

It was a stolen car.

A short pursuit followed, halted when the fleeing SUV endangered morning commuters in Ontario, a border city about 35 miles northwest of Boise, Idaho. Law enforcement later learned that the vehicle, now abandoned, was in a ravine in the foothills of an area under control of the Bureau of Land Management. During a ground and air search, suspect Jerry Boatman was located walking a short distance away and taken into custody. Other officers, following foot and dog tracks leading away from the stolen Chevy, observed a German shepherd and attempted to catch it. The dog ran straight to a badger hole in the side of a hill and went inside. As officers were extracting the dog, they heard faint cries for help coming from deeper within the hole.

Those cries for help were from the other parolee, Greg Morrow, who had decided to scramble into the badger hole to hide from approaching officers; it seems Morrow, wanted for a parole violation and burglary charge, had crawled so deeply into the hole that his shoulders were now pinned tightly against the sides of the hole, eight feet deep, and was unable to move, complaining that he was quickly losing feeling in his arms.

Law enforcement  personnel, using shovels, freed Morrow from the hole ninety minutes later, only to lock him up in a very different kind of 'hole'...a jail cell. Had it not been for Morrow's loyal dog, officers said it would have been very unlikely that they would have found Morrow and that Morrow, in turn, would probably have died due to exposure over the coming days.

Greg Morrow should probably count himself lucky on two points: that his dog led officers to him and that the burrow was unoccupied while Morrow had been crawling inside. Badgers are very ferocious animals and the trapped Morrow's face would have been fully exposed and defenseless.

Gregory Morrow

Officers working to extract Morrow from the badger hole