2 service dogs missing from Bangor

BANGOR – Five years ago, David Warrington moved across the country to be near his daughter. Now he’s trying to find the two friends who have been by his side since his days on the West Coast.

Warrington, 40, of Bucksport, a photographer with his own business and a pottery instructor at the H.O.M.E. facility in Orland, cannot find his two dogs, Lucky and Flash.

He last saw them at a barbecue at his girlfriend’s house on Webster Avenue last Thursday. Sometime during the barbecue the two dogs, which were loose in the yard, ran off. No one has seen them since.

He has talked to the Humane Society, the Bangor Police Department, the Brewer Police Department, and several state officials in search of his 110-pound, mixed-breed dogs. Everyone has told him the same thing: “We don’t know where your dogs are.”

“I’m really concerned, because they have collars and they have tags. It’s not like them to be gone for five days,” Warrington said Monday.

“We’re surprised that no one has called on the dogs, here we are in Bangor, with two big dogs like that … they’re very lovable, very friendly, they’d jump right in your car if you called them,” he said.

Warrington is worried that someone has taken the dogs and made them their own.

He used to live in Rhododendron, Ore., a small town outside Portland. He got the pick of the litter when his friend’s dog, a German shepherd, gave birth to a litter of puppies by way of a malamute.

Warrington picked a male he called Flash. Flash eventually fathered a litter of puppies with a Labrador. Warrington gave the name Lucky to the adventurous male that first wandered out from underneath the porch where his mother had given birth.

In 1999, when Warrington was working at Portland Providence Hospital in Portland, Ore., he began bringing the dogs to work. There they played with sick kids in the hospital’s children’s wing. Warrington still has a letter from the hospital’s activity coordinator, dated Oct. 26, 1999.

The letter describes the children as “neurologically impaired and physically disabled.”

“Both dogs interacted with the children and staff wonderfully, coming up to greet people and allowing everyone to pet them,” the letter states.

When Warrington moved across the country to be near his daughter in November 1999, the dogs came along. A television station in Oregon even did a story on the two dogs and how they wouldn’t be seen around the children’s hospital any longer, he said.

He started taking them to Bangor City Nursing Facility, which is now known as Bangor Area Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

Warrington has a Web site devoted to the dogs, and has made T-shirts bearing pictures of the dogs that he gives to the hospitals and nursing homes where he brings them.

“The dogs are like my children. These are my boys,” Warrington said, as pictures of the dogs lay strewn out on the kitchen table in front of him.

“I just don’t want to have to break any bad news to my daughter when she asks me about Lucky and Flash,” he said.

Anyone who has information about the dogs is asked to contact the Bangor Police Department at 947-7384.