Greenville County, South Carolina
On active duty
A golden retriever trained to find the electronics hidden in child exploitation cases.
His unit handles internet crimes against children. The evidence in those cases is usually on something small, and usually somewhere nobody would look.
Phones, tablets, thumb drives, memory cards, hidden cameras. Finding them is his job, and the rest of this page is how.
Electronics get a coating that keeps them from overheating. It is called triphenylphosphine oxide, and it is on every phone, thumb drive, memory card and hidden camera ever built. Scooby was trained on that one compound.
He works a room by air. Vents, wall cavities, mattress seams, the inside of a speaker. If a device is in there, the smell is in there, and he alerts.
It sits on the circuit board, so shape and size make no difference to him. Discs, Blu-rays and hidden cameras carry a second compound too: hydroxycyclohexyl phenyl ketone.
“It’s a smell. It’s a pin drop of a chemical that’s put on the devices to make sure they don’t overheat. It’s a very minute smell.”
150+hidden devices found
76search warrants worked
Defenders for Children counts more than nine in ten of these cases turning on digital evidence kept on a hidden device.
Counts as reported in May 2026. Both have kept going.
She had done the job for years and earned her retirement. Scooby took over in August 2024. Defenders for Children placed him and found him a sponsor.
International Plastics paid for the sponsorship, and picked his name. The program tends to use retrievers because they have the temperament for the work. Scooby has plenty of it.
International PlasticsGreenville manufacturer, his naming sponsorBacking Defenders for Children since 2010Also sponsored Queue, the program’s first detection K-9interplas.com (opens in a new tab)Between warrants, Scooby goes to Greenville County schools, where he gets mobbed. The Sheriff’s Office takes him anywhere a friendly dog helps: classrooms, community events, career days that end with everybody on the floor.
He also works the quiet rooms. He sits with children through forensic interviews, on some of the hardest days those children will have.
Off duty he is a therapy dog, and the program picks gentle breeds for exactly that. His handler says children get excited about the name itself, and that it puts a smile on their faces, adults included.
“Scooby comes in, and you can see them light up. Not just the children. It’s wives, the other people that are in the houses. He’s able to bring their stress level down just a little bit and let them forget about what’s going on.”
The story that took him national, reported alongside his handler. It is where the counts above come from, and where Defenders for Children CEO Toni Clark gives the figure under them.
WSPA 7NewsMarch 7, 2025The station’s recurring first-responder feature turns to Scooby and the ICAC unit he serves.
Written up the week the handover happened. It carries Queue’s record and what she did next.
The sponsor’s own announcement of the press event that introduced him.
Sheriff’s OfficeOctober 9, 2024The department filmed one of his school visits. Predictably, he is the center of it.
Their own photographs of him working, posted with the line that he was “caught doing what he does best.”
He drops in on Ms. Westfall’s special education class at Greenville High School, scored to “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”
The WSPA story also ran at Yahoo News (opens in a new tab). The Sheriff’s Office posts as @gcsogreenvillesc (opens in a new tab) on TikTok and @gcsogvlsc (opens in a new tab) on Instagram.
“He can only eat when he’s working. He doesn’t get treats. He doesn’t get anything but his food. And it’s only when he finds something that he gets something to eat.”
“But he finds the devices, so don’t worry. He gets to eat.”
That is all it is to him. The investigators know what the cases are, and having a dog in the room makes those days easier for them, and for the children the cases are about.
Defenders for Children is a Greenville nonprofit that works on the side of children in these cases. They place detection dogs with the investigative units that ask for one, and dogs whose whole job is sitting with a child through an interview.
Scooby was one of those placements. They are raising the next dog now.
Defenders for ChildrenGreenville, since 201027 detection K-9s placed nationwideFounded and led by Toni Clarkdefendersforchildren.org (opens in a new tab)