Mantua Police K9 Fund

In 2012, a large scale fund drive was started to fund the Mantua Police Department's K9 Unit. While the Mantua Police Department has had K9 units in the past, this was a start-up for the latest unit. It had been almost 10 years since the Mantua Police Department had a K9 unit in place.

With the large rise in the drugs in our community and the increase in drug arrests by officers in neighboring departments, an initiative began to fund a combination Patrol and Narcotics K9 team. Ken Justus took on the task of being the K9 officer and after having successfully collecting over $25,000 in donations, K9 Vader was purchased. Lt. Justus and K9 Vader attended training at Excel K9 in Hiram in the fall of 2012 and became active working the road in October of 2012.

Since then, Lt. Justus and K9 Vader have made many arrests and participated in many uses around the county and in neighboring counties.

In the fall of 2014, an opportunity presented itself for the Crestwood School Resource Officer Patrolman Joe Urso to also have a K9. This dog would be a narcotics only dog and would be with Urso daily in our school buildings. The trainer, Paul Shaughnessy at Excel K9 in Hiram, donated the dog and trained both Urso and K9 Diablo. A successful donation campaign took place and we were able to generate most of the monies needed to fund this K9 team.

K9 Diablo and Ptl. Urso have begun working in the schools and are fully certified in narcotics detection.

We are continually seeking donations to fund the expenditures that go into proving equipment for our K9 units. These shirts were offered last fall before Christmas. However, we know that a lot of people never made the cut off order date or never had the opportunity to purchase shirts. And, we did not meet all of the funding needs for the Second K9 team.

So, in an effort to collect additional donations, we are again offering the shirts for sale as a fund raiser.

Thank you for all of the support we have received.