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Died 1/28/17
Handler – Officer Pat Bartel
Canine cop dies less than a month after leaving the force
Police dog’s retirement was all too brief
Like a lot of old men, Marco was not enjoying retirement. When his partner and now owner, Officer Pat Bartel, would leave for work, the Belgian Malinois did not like the fact that he could not go with. After all, he’d been with the Sterling Police Department, working side-by-side with Bartel, for a decade, searching for drugs and cadavers, tracking and protecting. “They’re geared to work, and sometimes when you take that work away, they kind of stop,” Bartel said. Saturday, he found his K-9 partner dead in his kennel, just shy of a month after retiring from the force. He was 12. When Bartel went to check on him Friday night, he thought Marco showed signs of having had a stroke, he said. He planned to have him euthanized the next day. That morning, he found that Marco had crawled into the corner of his kennel and died. Before the stroke, he hadn’t shown any sign of illness. In fact, Marco was playing outside with his daughter just 2 days before, Bartel said. Local mortician Joe McDonald, who also provides pet cremations, cremated Marco for free, and gave Bartel his ashes. Bartel plans to put a picture of Marco, along with his service dates, on the urn, and he and some of the 17 other area K-9 handlers are planning a small memorial. Marco began his stint with the department in March 2005, at almost a year and a half old. He retired Dec. 31. “His mind and everything else wanted to work, but it was just his body, kind of like us humans, you get to a point and you just can’t do that same things anymore,” Bartel said upon his retirement. “We spent 10 to 12 hours a day together in a car. He was a partner that I could always rely on, and he was always there for me. He’s like a member of the family.”
