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“When I saw that young girl collapsed on the street outside the station, I called for help on my radio and looked for a place to tie up my dog. I rushed back and picked the girl up in my arms. As I held her she began talking to me. There was a small hole in her blouse where the bullet had entered. There was very little bleeding so I really believed she’d be alright. She started to cry and I just kept holding her close to me. I told her everything would be fine but she died in my arms while we were waiting for the ambulance. It was over twenty-five years ago and I still think about her.” —Barry Galfano 


Once Barry learned he would be the commanding officer in charge of the care, health and job performance of fifty dogs working in the NYPD’s Canine Unit, it was the fulfillment of his life long love affair with police dogs. When Barry was just ten, he began training his first German Shepherd. “I wanted him to be just like Rin Tin Tin,” he said. The basic course for police dogs and their handlers is sixteen weeks. Training the dogs to find dead bodies, narcotics, and other search and rescue tasks takes another twelve weeks – that’s a total of twenty-eight weeks, almost a half year.

Barry works the depths of the New York City subway system in the brutal heat of the summer and cold of the winter. He’s anguished when a fourteen-year-old girl shot in a coffee shop dies in his arms and as he comforts a suicidal man who is about to die after leaping to his death in front of a subway train. Harry, a German Shepherd that Galfano says was the best police dog ever, helps him chase a brutal rapist into a bar and get the gun wielding criminal under arrest.

He spent a heartbreaking nine months at Ground Zero supervising the hundreds of dogs that showed up to help pursuing a frantic, but ultimately hopeless, search for his colleagues and other victims who were never seen again.

“It was a mess,” Barry said. “During those first weeks we had over one hundred dogs. We had to figure out which ones were trained for search and rescue. We told the people who brought their family pet to leave, but some wouldn’t do it.”

A big part of Galfano’s job was to figure out which dogs had FEMA training. With the exception of the NYPD and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, most law enforcement agencies do not send their police dogs for FEMA training so they are not experienced at search and rescue missions. The dogs who were trained for rescue work were frustrated when they searched day after day and were unable to find survivors.

“At the beginning we thought we’d be able to help hundreds, if not thousands, of people,” Galfano said. “But even with the dogs, we couldn’t find anyone. All the dogs found was body parts or small pieces of tissue.”

The grim reality began to set in that there would be no one to rescue. At that point the decision was made to call in the cadaver dogs. They found thousands of body parts.

“It’s hard to explain how discouraging that was,” Galfano remembered. “We had all kinds of emergency vehicles, ambulances, doctors, nurses, and EMT’s lined up for miles waiting to rush victims to the hospital. At the beginning, when we couldn’t find anyone, we were hoping they all got out. It took a long time for us to accept the fact that they had all been incinerated or crushed to death.”