‘Nice to find somebody alive.’ Ruby the dog helps find blind man lost in Missouri woods

Police in Hillsboro, Missouri, aren’t sure how 43-year-old Christopher Newton ended up in the woods near his home.

He disappeared on Friday and was still missing on Sunday - especially alarming because Newton is blind.

“He has a beard, is blind and suffers from epilepsy,” the department posted Saturday on its Facebook page. “He has been missing at least 18 hours.”

On Sunday, the police called in the dogs - Gateway Search Dogs of St. Louis.

The search team that showed up included Wallee, a 2-and-a-half-year-old bloodhound, and Ruby, a 3-year-old lab mix on one of her first missions. It was the first time the department had ever worked with Gateway, Chief John Hutt told McClatchy.

Neither Hutt nor the dogs’ handlers knew what they would find when they walked into the woods near the mobile home park where Newton lives.

They were prepared for the worst-case scenario given how long Newton had been missing, Hutt said.

Wallee scored the first success of the search when he found one of Newton’s shoes, which led searchers deeper into the heavy woods, KSDK in St. Louis reported.

Then Ruby went to work.

“When she runs off from me, she smells something, and she’s going to find it,” owner Marla Vollmer told KSDK. “All of a sudden, I saw her hackles go up, she went into a creek bed, and started barking.”

And there he was.

Newton was lying on a grassy area near the creek bed, Hutt said.

Vollmer told KSDK she gave Ruby the command to find human remains.

Ruby thought she found a dead body.

“It kind of spooked Ruby,” Hutt said. “When she went up to him she kind of bunny-hopped in the air when he moved and she started barking.”

Vollmer told KSDK that Ruby’s been on the job just a few short months.

“It was really nice to find somebody alive,” she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “We don’t often get the opportunity to do that.”

Photos of the rescue on the fire department’s Facebook page show Newton being carried out of the woods to an ambulance.

“We are happy to announce that Ruby (search dog) located Mr. Newton in a creek bed approximately 1/4 mile from his residence in a heavily wooded area,” the department wrote on Facebook. “Mr. Newton is in good health and has been transported for evaluation.”

Hutt said that Newton feels his way from his home to the mailboxes in the mobile home park by touching the mailboxes, and that he might have become disoriented for some reason.

The police chief said he was impressed with the work of the dogs and everyone who helped in the search.

Good-girl Ruby was rewarded for a job well done with a cooked chicken breast.

This story was originally published October 10, 2018 at 11:19 AM.