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Died – 3/9/21
Handler – Cpl. Rob Alexander
Alabama sheriff’s office mourns loss of beloved K9 deputy
The Lee County Sheriff’s Office is mourning the loss of one of their K9 deputies Wednesday after she succumbed to her battle with cancer. Deputy Charlee, a 9-year-old black lab, served with the Sheriff’s Office School Resource Officer Division and spent six years supporting children and searching for drugs in Lee County Schools, authorities with the sheriff’s office said. Cpl. Rob Alexander, Charlee’s partner, said he would spend all day everyday with Charlee, and the loss “feels just like losing a family member.” “She was one of a kind,” Alexander said. “She was like my partner 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s how much time she spent at my side. The relationship you build with that canine versus your typical canine you have at home, I would say it was probably two-to-three times stronger because she was with me all the time.” Alexander would take her on vacations with him, have her sleep on a bed next to his own and would, of course, visit county schools every day as a part of their job together. “She would look to me as if I was her best friend and she was my best friend,” Alexander said. Sheriff Jay Jones said his office currently has five dogs trained to be deputies after the loss of Charlee, and that the relationship deputies have with their canine partners is instrumental to their job performance, whether that job is explosive detection, narcotics detection, search and rescue, building searches or acting as an ambassador to the public. “The bonding between handler and canine partner is a very critical component of the team, and that dog basically stays with that handler all the time at home, on patrol and even when they’re off duty,” Jones said. “The bond helps to establish a circumstance where the handler can read the dog—their movements, their actions—and they know exactly when the dog is detecting, and it helps to make the team more efficient.” The obvious downside to that strong bond comes when, inevitably, the human deputies outlive their four-legged partners. “Their life on duty can generally go from about eight to maybe 10 years, and after that when they retire, they go to the care of their partner,” Jones said. “It can be devastating—I mean, anyone who’s ever owned a dog and lost that dog knows how that feels. It’s losing a member of the family, and to us, our whole agency suffers the loss.” Authorities with the sheriff’s office said Charlee’s cancer diagnosis was recent, and despite fighting valiantly she could not overcome the toll it took on her body. She passed away Tuesday. The diagnosis first came about five months ago when Charlee underwent surgery to remove a cancerous cyst from her neck. She then began receiving oral chemotherapy treatments every three weeks for about four months before scanning her and finding the cancer had spread to her spleen. “The scan showed three more spots on her spleen, and it showed that we were dealing with a very aggressive cancer that was really, really hard to slow down and, I was told, was impossible to get rid of,” Alexander said. “At that time, I started knowing our days together were numbered.”Alexander said, for a while, Charlee still behaved and acted like the healthy, happy and passive black lab he had known for the past six years, but that changed one day when Alexander went to his patrol car and found Charlee to be sluggish. “She was very lethargic and didn’t want to get up. … She wouldn’t walk and didn’t move, so I rushed her to the East University vet,” Alexander said. “One of the new spots on her spleen, a tumor, had ruptured and was bleeding internally into her body and caused her blood pressure and blood count to drop really low. … We had gone from a daily routine to her not wanting to move.” Charlee was put on an IV to make her feel better for the short term, and Alexander said he spoke to the sheriff’s office and retired her from service while she spent her final days in Alexander’s care at home. After about a week, she started failing to keep her food down before she stopped eating entirely, at which point she was taken to be euthanized on Tuesday in order to be at peace. “She ‘Crossed the Bridge’ yesterday and joined her fellow law enforcement K9 officers at peace,” authorities with the sheriff’s office wrote in a release on Wednesday. “Her pain is gone and she is free to run through endless fields. She was a good girl—we will miss her.” Alexander said he will always remember Charlee’s bright smile and watching her ears perk up when they were together. Jones said when canine deputies pass, handlers like Alexander decide if they’d like a new canine partner in the future, but for now the sheriff’s office remembers and honors the dog and deputy Charlee was, and her name will be added to a K9 unit memorial outside of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office to commemorate the talented four-legged partners who came and went before her. “We consider them a member of our agency just as much as we do a deputy sheriff of the two-legged variety,” Jones said. “They always have a special place with us in our agency, and we look at them as partners in our mission of protecting the public.”
