Injured Boy Reunites with Police K9 Who Saved Him

Sometimes, the best man for the job is a dog.

When 13-year-old Dakota “Cody” Trenkle went missing in July, a group of family, friends, responders, and volunteers spent more than three days combing the steep, heavily forested area near Goose Creek Lake, Missouri, looking for him.

Yet it was K9 Daryl who did something none of the human searchers could do — he sniffed out Cody, who had fallen off his skateboard and tumbled 240 feet into a ravine, coming to rest in about 12 inches of water.

It was some of the most challenging terrain imaginable, according to Lt. Joe Gillam, the leader of the K9 unit from Farmington Correctional Center, where Daryl usually works.

“Pretty much a straight down ditch,” he told St. Louis’ NBC outlet, KSDK-TV. “It was hilly, really thick undergrowth. It was rough terrain, really rough.”

What the crowd of humans couldn’t accomplish in 80 hours, K-9 Daryl — a bloodhound — did in only 20 minutes.

Daryl’s discovery on July 30 came not a moment too soon. Cody was already in rough shape.

He had sustained deep cuts and severe head trauma with brain bleeds and skull fractures, according to People. He developed pneumonia and infections from the water he’d been lying in since the crash.

He was airlifted to a St. Louis hospital and spent two weeks in a medically induced coma.

His mom, Stephanie Neely, told People a “pivotal” moment in Cody’s recovery was when he woke up from the coma in mid-August and used sign language to tell her, “I love you.”

That small but meaningful gesture “made the last couple weeks of stress, heartache, hope, gratitude, sadness, and pain worth it because that small gesture meant my boy was coming back to me,” she told People at the time.

Cody still faces a long road to recovery, given his brain trauma and other injuries. But he has made such good progress that he was able to start school again last week.

His first day back “was all right,” Cody said. “I didn’t get to do the things I wanted to. I couldn’t go through the hall with all the people because of safety precautions with my head.”

One highlight of his day was having a reunion with K9 Daryl.

“Thank you,” he told the four-legged hero. “Thanks, Bubbas.”

“I got to meet the dog that saved my life,” Cody told KSDK.

“If I’d had to spend a couple more hours down there, I wouldn’t have made it. But because of him, 20 minutes, man, I’m impressed.”

Gillam, too, was impressed with the dog.

“Twenty minutes on a three-day-old track, that’s almost unheard of,” Gillam told KSDK.

K9 Daryl and the humans on his K9 team were honored last week by the Missouri Department of Corrections.

But witnessing the positive outcome of what had been a very bleak situation was worth more than mere medals and awards.

“Just seeing that what we do every week in training paid off, that’s what we worked for,” Gillam added. “And this time, it worked out best-case scenario.”

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