Foothills woman teams up with her K9 to find missing people

CATALINA FOOTHILLS, Ariz. (KGUN) — As Brunhilde the German Shepherd sniffed around her owner Gabriele Koschorke’s car, she was trying to pick up the scent of a man that was hiding hundreds of feet away.

Koschorke has been training with dogs to find missing people for the past ten years and six year old Brunhilde is her newest trainee.

“You just learn to work with each other and to learn with each other,” Koschorke said.

They first started by passing Jeff Schettler’s levels one through four trailing test in South Carolina. Level four involved going through a trail in Scottsdale to find a person who had left four hours previous.

“The track was about a mile long. We had to have two obstacles which could’ve been a large road, bridges,” she sad.

Koschorke said they were the fifth K9 team who passed level four in the last 16 years.

Excelling in the training, they then went on to level one tactical trailing in November 2022. Brunhilde learned to point her head in the direction of the person who was missing.

“The dog actually let me know if I’m closer to the person we are looking for and gives me an alert,” she said.

Next came level two, which they passed in November 2023. It built upon level one but involved a team of people called flankers who would move around the trail with the dog.

“We were shot at if we were not calling up the proximity alert correctly or defiling and get to the subject before the subject actually could overpower us,” Koschorke said.

She said they’re the only team that trained with Schettler that got certified in level two, which she said is something usually only SWAT or special forces military K9 teams can pass.

Their training came to use when they found an actual missing person.

“I presumed that the person was picked up by a car, which actually was correct,” Koschorke said.

Now Koschorke and Brunhilde are able to work with agencies like SWAT and police departments to help find missing people. They are already working with a few in Arizona.

However, Koschorke is hoping more agencies pick them up so they can help more people.

“Hopefully helping the community to find lost people,” she said.