Cotton, the dog who helped identify hundreds of arsons, has died, Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner Ralph Hudgens said Monday.
The Labrador Retriever had just passed his 14th birthday when he died Thursday after a brief illness. He was the state’s sixth and longest serving arson dog, Hudgens said.
“Without his special abilities, hundreds of suspicious fires in Georgia may have gone unsolved,” Hudgens said.
Cotton was born Feb. 9, 2001, and began his training as a canine arson detective in August 2003 at the Maine State Police Training Center in Alfred, Maine.
Between September 2003 and January 2014, Cotton and his handler, Investigator Bruce Gourley, were involved in more than 3,000 fire investigations, which led to 250 convictions, including six arrests for murders that involved arson, Hudgens said. Cotton specialized in sniffing out petrochemical products to determine if accelerants were used to start a fire.
Gourley and Cotton worked their last assignment in August 2013 on a business fire in Barrow County that was determined to be arson. That case ended with a guilty pleas, a five-year probationary sentence and $1,000 fine, Hudgens said.
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