Helper to Others Needs Your Help Now

Written by Laurel Walker / Jsonline.com / Posted: Mar. 10, 2009

A.J. Marhofke isn’t in the habit of begging, and neither are his faithful sidekicks, Molly Mae and Zip.

AJ Marhofke and 911bc need your help

Well, maybe Zip begs. The lively 10-year-old border collie pushed tennis balls in my direction again and again, hoping I’d throw so he could chase.

Molly Mae, a 13-year-old border collie mix who’s now blind and ill, is just not up for play these days.

Neither is Marhofke, and that’s the crux of the problem.

This is the team that makes up 911BC – a nonprofit, volunteer K-9 search-and-rescue unit based in the Town of Summit and founded by Marhofke in 1969. Marhofke, 62, is a onetime maintenance worker, deputy medical examiner and paramedic.

But his full-time passion has always been his dogs, K-9 search training, and responding at no charge to law enforcement all over the country. His dogs specialize in finding people – dead or alive – and forensic evidence, the stuff of crime scenes and court cases.

Molly Mae is retired but admired enough by others that in January Gov. Jim Doyle issued her a formal commendation. Among other accomplishments, Doyle cited her work in finding a Waukesha County developmentally disabled man lost in the wild for three days in 1998, her work with a triple Krnak family homicide in Jefferson County that same year, and her “gentle demeanor and calming effect on children” during Marhofke’s educational presentations to kids groups.

Molly Mae is out of commission, and now, for up to 12 weeks at least, Marhofke is, too. That’s what has him frustrated and worried.

He fell off a few steps of a ladder last week, seriously breaking his heel in the process. Surgery is scheduled for Monday, and he’s under strict orders to stay off the foot for up to 12 weeks. He’s not sure how he’ll tend to the dogs’ needs, especially Molly Mae’s, whose blindness and medications leave her in need of special attention.

Kathryne Jacobs of Cudahy recently struck up a friendship with Marhofke through a mutual business acquaintance. She’s helping him around the house a couple of days a week and getting him to doctors’ appointments, but she can’t be there daily for the dogs. She’s got two of her own. His usual pet sitters are about to leave on vacation.

Jacobs e-mailed this newspaper with a plea that Marhofke was too proud to make himself.

“This man who has done so much for others his whole life, and who has poured his life’s energy and life savings into helping others, now needs some help himself,” she wrote.

She’s hoping someone will step forward – like a scout troop, dog lovers, a volunteer pet sitter – with anything that can see him through this spell. Not only are the dogs a concern, but tasks as simple as getting mail from the roadside mailbox is a problem. (If you can help, e-mail Marhofke at k9911@yahoo.com.)

Marhofke’s heel injury is only the latest in a terrible string of bad luck that would bring most people to their knees.

Two of his three adult sons died a year apart, in 2000 and 2001, one from suicide and one from an accidental drug overdose, he said. For three years he nursed the love of his life, a woman he’d met only a year earlier, until she died of ovarian cancer in 2007.

His previous jobs, especially doing death investigations for a former medical examiner and his K-9 searches for human remains, had left him accustomed to death. But then it hit home.

“It was never close and personal until I lost my sons,” he said. “My colors changed. It hurt.”

He says he had never cried before, but he’s cried since, plenty.

A year later he pulled a tendon in his elbow hauling luggage. A short time later, he broke a wrist. Now, the heel.

Marhofke is the son of a cop and the brother of the Dousman police chief and a retired Waukesha County sheriff’s detective, and his circle of friends includes many others in law enforcement.

“We’re not a huggy, fuzzy family,” he said. “They’re cops.”

When people ask him how he survives his circumstances, he’s quick to say he doesn’t have a clue.

But then, after some conversation, it comes out. He does have a clue.

“If I didn’t have my dogs,” he said, “I would be dead.”

Call Laurel Walker at (262) 650-3183 or e-mail lwalker@journalsentinel.com