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PROFILES
Marcel Dionne
Search and Rescue Pilot
September 1, 1997
Marcel Dionne solves crimes for a living. Whatever he does, he relates
it to police work, so when he flies it is with a detective's eyes,
peering down between the trees, looking for clues and criminals. He
flies low, tracing the back roads, the fields and the bayous searching
for missing men, for runaway kids, for things most of us hope we never
will see.
Flying and police work are two of his loves. He has been flying since
1967, first as a military observer and later as a civilian pilot.
Now, in addition to his full-time job as a detective with the Harris
County Sheriff's Department, he runs the all volunteer Air Search
and Recovery Unit called ALERT—Aerial Law Enforcement Response
Team—out of the West Houston Airport.
It began out of his own exasperation, trudging over the Texas countryside
looking for a homicide victim. "This would be a lot easier from
the air," he thought. Maybe the Civil Air Patrol could help.
He called them.
The CAP colonel in charge asked him, "Do you think these people
are alive, or dead?"
"I'm pretty sure they're dead," Marcel said.
"Well, are there going to be any charges filed out of this?"
"Probably so. We know who the suspect is."
"Then, we can't go out on it," the colonel said. The law
did not allow them. The Civil Air Patrol mission is to search for
downed airplanes, with the hope of finding survivors.
Marcel says, "Our main mission is saving lives." But there
aren't always survivors. He, and other law enforcement officers. needed
better, swifter search tools. Fifteen years ago Harris Count had a
helicopter they could use, but in 1994, they had nothing. Marcel,
and three other
pilots, decided they could help. He approached his bureau major with
their Search and Rescue volunteer idea. The major said, "Do you
think you could get me something that works?"
Marcel said, "I could build you the best unit you could ask
for."
One of Marcel's talents has always been to look at a situation and
see how it could be in four or five years. He has done this in the
music business, building a band, in the printing business, growing
from a single press to many, and most recently with this Search and
Rescue team. "It's like building a radio control model,"
he says. You do it piece by piece.
They started with a nucleus of four pilots and a few planes. Now
it has grown to 65 members, both civilian pilots and police-trained
observers. At their last meeting they launched 17 airplanes on their
training missions.
Marcel designed an official school, sanctioned by the Texas Commission
Law Enforcement Standards of Education, for the observers. Many of
them had no experience in airplanes. Their first step is getting acclimated
to being in the air. Then they learn grid navigation, directing the
pilot and train their eyes to distinguish significant details on the
ground. On a mission they fly as low as 500 feet.
"When you fly high, you tend to look straight ahead," Marcel
says. "But, when you are flying low you look down and notice
things—a new road, a subdivision being built. You notice a lot
more of the aspects of the ground changing all the time. You see obstructions
you didn't know were there." The officers are training for search
and rescue, but a side effect is a clearer picture of areas and neighborhoods.
At the monthly meetings they have an exercise called, Dump the Dummy.
One volunteer puts a dummy some place, marks the latitude and longitude
on a grid map and the teams set out with to find it. On occasion,
they have had some unwelcome help and interference.
"One time, on a practice mission, we had a 12-year-old boy sized
mannequin donated by Foleys," Marcel says. "It had a new
sweatshirt, brand new pants and running shoes. We put it in a field.
Kids found it and tried to steal the clothes.
"Another time, we ran on this farmer's property and he had a
couple of kids. Of course we mark the lat and long to find out how
good the unit's doing. They weren't finding it and I said, 'Something's
wrong.' So, the guy that actually dumped it, I sent him out in the
plane. He said, 'Marcel, it isn't there.'
"I called the house and the guy said, 'Oh, yeah, the kids stood
it up against the tree to help you out.'
"Sometimes with a body, you may not see it going north and south,
but you may be able to see it going east and west," he says.
They did their grid search both ways, but this dummy was too well
hidden, propped jauntily, as it was, with one arm stretched out, fingers
on the tree bark.
The observers are all law enforcement officers and they seem to enjoy
the challenge of searches. "Most police officers are hunters
by nature," he says. Some of their missions have included finding
lost children, an elderly woman with Alzheimer's disease and assessing
damage after a pipeline explosion. They search with both helicopters
and fixed wing aircraft.
Marcel is learning to fly the helicopters they purchased in 1996,
at drastically reduced prices—at one tenth of their value--under
the military assistance program. The unit has five Hueys that they
and assembled from parts and flew cross country from Ft. Rucker, Alabama.
All of their financing is from donations and fund raising activities.
They only use the helicopters for selected missions.
"Basically, this unit is a fixed wing operation," he says.
"When we get an emergency call, the first airplanes to launch
are fixed wing. You can launch them in probably one third of the time
that it takes to start the helicopter and to get it off the ground.
Some of them take 45 minutes to an hour.
"On the Humble search for a 9-year-old boy, from the time we
received the call until we were over the spot was 18 minutes in a
little Cessna 150. Another little girl, off Highway 6, was found in
45 minutes. The lady with Alzheimer's was found in 55 minutes.
"If I am going to search for somebody for a long time, I'll
dispatch a fixed wing," he says. "I think we can do as effective
a job, with the exception of hovering and landing at the site."
Harris County is a big territory, 550 square miles. Marcel and his
volunteers help to shrink it to a more workable size. "We give
officers on the ground a platform to work from," he says. And
they do it in their spare time, after working at their full-time jobs.
What keeps Marcel going is the hope of making a difference. "I
guess everyone wants to be a hero someday," he says. "Everybody
wants to find this person, or that child, before they are dead."
And, in the past, he has done exactly that. In 1985 he earned both
the Medal of Honor and the Medal of Merit within a six months period.
One was for rescuing an adolescent girl who had been kidnapped, sold,
assaulted and abused. "When I hit the house and snatched him
up, the guy was fixing to kill her." That day, he truly was a
hero.
As tough, and gut-wrenching as his work may be, he says, "I
have never had a day where I say, 'I wish I didn't have to go to work.'"
He loves justice, seeing what makes people tick, their motives, how
they do the things they get away with. He especially loves it on the
days when he gets to fly—low level, up and down the section
lines, above the trees, along the coast, making sense of all he sees
among the clutter on the ground.
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