Ballew credits K-9 partner in finding missing girl: ‘Without Barry, we would have walked right by’
By Brandi Makuski
STEVENS POINT — Hidden so well that even officers standing 20 feet away couldn’t see her, 6-year-old Ruby Lehmann was found alive Sept. 13 when police dog Barry nosed into a brush pile and uncovered the missing girl.
Lehmann was reported missing from a home in Almond on Sept. 11, triggering an intensive effort that spanned area homes, fields, and forests. Sheriff Mike Lukas said officers were running a grid search when Plover Assistant Chief Brian Noel spotted tire tracks, which helped narrow the focus to a heavily wooded area off Third Avenue.
Given the terrain and the size of the search area, authorities activated both the Portage County SWAT team and the Stevens Point–Plover joint SWAT team. Sgt. JD Ballew said a little more than 20 tactical officers formed a long skirmish line to sweep through the woods while a drone was unable to see through the “super thick” canopy.
Ballew and his K-9 partner, Barry, worked the end of the line. Barry was on a six-foot lead and, instead of tracking footprints, was “air-scenting” for human odor riding the wind.
“We basically created a huge line and started working through the woods like a deer drive,” Ballew said. “His head really kicked up, and he started circling, trying to taste the air.”
As officers paused along a narrow road that split the 40-acre tract, Barry began giving what Ballew calls “proximity alerts”—head up, light on his front paws, quartering to read the breeze. When the line stepped into the second 20 acres, Barry surged around a pine tree and drove into a brush pile.
“He noses the branches straight up, and there was a little girl’s leg,” Ballew said. “Without Barry, 100 percent we would have walked right by. They were concealed that well.”
Sgt. Ross Wierzba and officer Kevin Gomez crawled in through the thicket to help. Officers freed Ruby and took the suspect into custody without injury. Ballew said both appeared unhurt.
The concealment was so complete that even with a perimeter of officers—including state troopers and a federal agent—no one on the road 20 feet away could see into the hide.
Ballew credited training and conditions for the find. With a steady cross-breeze, Barry worked the “scent cone,” zig-zagging until he reached the source. The 7-year-old police dog is methodical—“not a sprinter,” Ballew said—which helped him conserve energy in the heat while the team crawled through brush so dense “there were points that we were crawling.”
“It was one of those things—like, this voodoo magic works,” Ballew said with a chuckle. “I know what I’m asking him to do, but he’s got a way different brain. There’s no deductive reasoning with canines. For him to understand exactly what I wanted was a combination of all the training we’ve done together.”
Barry meets the industry standard of 16 hours of formal training each month, but Ballew adds daily 20- to 30-minute sessions he calls “maintenance,” plus specialized courses. Those, he said, are made possible by donations from the public.
“I’ll even throw a plug in for the citizens that donate all this money for us to hit these specialized trainings,” Ballew said. “If I would have missed some of those, Barry would have been confused. Instead, all the stars aligned with this.”
From the initial call on that day to the discovery, Ballew estimated that two to two-and-a-half hours had passed. The Stevens Point–Plover team first met at the police department so commanders could account for personnel; Ballew said 12 members from that team responded, with Portage County contributing nearly its entire unit.
Ballew called the rescue “the pinnacle” of both their careers. “It was a great outcome. We were able to find her and him. Nobody got hurt,” he said.
And Barry?
“After all that’s done, he just goes back to being a dog,” Ballew said with a laugh. “He doesn’t understand the magnitude of what he just did.”