Man, dog are reunited

After the distribution of countless flyers around Glen Cove, multiple social media posts and repeated canvassing of the city’s neighborhoods, the frantic seven-day search for Vinny, a 15-month-old labradoodle, finally ended on Dec. 27.
It was a difficult Christmas for Carlos Vazquez and his family, after Vinny, a registered emotional-support animal, went missing on Dec. 20, escaping from a friend’s home in Glen Cove. The family had owned the dog since September 2022 — just weeks before a catastrophe that changed Vazquez’s relationship with Vinnie forever.
On the morning of Oct. 6, 2022, Vazquez, a crossing guard for the Glen Cove City school district had just ushered a group of children across Dosoris Lane, outside Deasy Elementary School, when he was struck from behind by an SUV driven by an 82-year-old Bayville man and thrown 20 feet in the air before landing on a cement sidewalk. Vazquez, who has a prosthetic leg from an accident nearly 30 years, ago doesn’t remember anything about the accident 15 months ago.
Vazquez went into cardiac arrest twice, once before being airlifted to Manhasset’s North Shore University Hospital, and again in the emergency room. Rushed to the intensive critical care unit, he was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, a fractured pelvis and kidney failure. Once he was stabilized, he was admitted to Glen Cove Hospital’s brain injury unit on Oct. 25. There he continued what doctors said was nothing less than a remarkable recovery.
Vazquez had his first accident in 1985, at age 20, when the motorcycle he was driving was hit by a 40-ton Mack truck. He underwent a number of surgeries, but his leg had to be amputated the following year, on his 21st birthday, and he was fitted for a prosthetic leg. Before that accident, he had run in the New York City Marathon and was training as a long-distance runner for the 1988 Olympics. A 1983 Glen Cove High School graduate, Vazquez is among those honored on its Wall of Fame for his record for the mile run — 4 minutes, 20 seconds.

Vazquez’s wife, Elizabeth Martino, said that Vinny was brought to Glen Cove Hospital to visit her husband while he was recovering in the fall of 2022 to comfort him and to help jog his memory of their home life. Since Vazquez returned home, Vinny has been his constant companion. Whenever the dog hears Vazquez moving around in a wheelchair or with a walker, he hurries to his side. These days Vinny is there when Vazquez gets out of the shower, when he’s in the kitchen and when he falls asleep at night. They do almost everything together.
“I’m using the walker a lot and I’m walking, but I still haven’t connected my brain with my feet yet,” Vazquez said. “I just keep on trying, so it’s getting there slowly. It’s been a year, but I’m moving. I don’t just sit there and cry about things. I move forward.”
When Vinny escaped on a cold evening late last month, Vazquez and Martino became anxious, because the dog is unfamiliar with most of Glen Cove. They feared that he might get hit by a car or by a train on the nearby Oyster Bay line of the Long Island Rail Road. The couple now speculates that before he escaped, Vinny caught the lingering scent of a dog owned by their daughter who recently moved to Locust Valley.
The rescue operation kicked into high gear when Kelly Brach, of Professional Pet Trackers, in Glen Cove and Susan Raso, founder and director of Cat Wrangler Rescue Inc., in Sea Cliff coordinated the effort, canvassing neighborhoods and utilizing tracking dogs to pinpoint Vinny’s location. The searchers employed high-tech methods including infrared cameras, drones and thermal scopes, but Vinny proved elusive.
Despite the challenges posed by his skittish behavior and the vast search area, the team persisted. Raso, who usually searches for cats, deployed motion-activated cellular surveillance cameras and a unique Wi-Fi-enabled trap triggering system. Brach used a total of five dogs in the search, all of them shepherds — two Czech shepherds, two Dutch shepherds, and one Dutch shepherd-Belgian Malinois mix.
The community rallied behind the effort, with numerous sightings reported by concerned citizens. Vinny’s skittishness and avoidance of people were attributed to fear and the unfamiliar environment in which he found himself, which added an extra layer of complexity to the rescue mission.
He was finally captured in a trap on Duck Pond Road at 4:44 a.m. on Dec. 27.
Brach advises that owners of lost pets “become small” by sitting on the ground and avoiding eye contact when the pet is nearby. She also advises not calling the animal’s name, and to let it approach “on its own terms.”
“Our moods give off a bit of a different odor — we can’t smell it as humans, but dogs can,” Brach said. “When we’re anxious — when we’re freaking out looking for a lost pet, and we’re full of anxiety, they can smell that. You could be 10 feet away from your lost dog, but if you’re nervous, that dog’s going to smell it. They resort to feeling like there’s something they need to be nervous about.”