On Tuesday, October 6, at 4:30 p.m., the City of Covington will cut a ribbon at Hands Pike Park in South Covington and open the K-9 Ernie Memorial Dog Park. It is a modest thing on its face: separate fenced runs for small and large dogs, water fountains, benches. But the name on the sign carries a story that stretches back more than a decade, to a rainy April night when a German Shepherd took two bullets for his handler and, in the process, ended up changing Kentucky law.
Ernie joined the Covington Police Department in June 2012, a German Shepherd paired with Officer Michael Lusardi. For the next eight-plus years the two worked the streets of Covington together, and by the time Ernie retired in October 2020 he had become, in the words of Kenton County Commonwealth's Attorney Rob Sanders, "the most famous K-9 in Kenton County history." That fame was earned the hard way.
In April 2015, police were looking for Daleon T. Rice, a man wanted in connection with stabbing his mother in the head during a domestic dispute. Three days after the attack, Officer Lusardi and Ernie attempted an arrest. Rice opened fire on both of them. Ernie was shot twice. What followed was a five-hour overnight manhunt through Covington before Rice was taken into custody.
Ernie survived. Two weeks after being shot, he was back on patrol with Lusardi. He was even fitted for a bullet-resistant vest. But the legal aftermath revealed something that stunned the department. Rice pleaded guilty to attempted murder of a police officer, assault on a service animal, and first-degree assault, and was sentenced to 40 years in prison — yet under Kentucky law at the time, shooting a police dog was only a felony if the dog died or could no longer work. Because Ernie recovered and returned to duty, the assault on him amounted to a misdemeanor that often carried no jail time at all. As the Associated Press reported, Rice would never serve a single day in prison for shooting Ernie.
That gap infuriated Lusardi and Sanders, who lobbied the state legislature to close it. "I didn't understand it," Lusardi said at the time. "To me, he's a partner, he's a police officer. He's saved my life several times." A first bill failed, but a second moved quickly through the Kentucky General Assembly. Kentucky was then one of only six states that treated harming a police dog as a misdemeanor, according to the United States Police Canine Association. The change became known as "Ernie's Law," and it made assaulting a police K-9 a felony in Kentucky regardless of whether the animal survives. It was signed in 2017.
The stakes were not merely symbolic. As Lt. Col. Brian Steffen of the Covington Police Department noted, when you add up the cost of buying, caring for, and training a working dog, a K-9 ends up costing a department more than a police car. And the bond between handler and dog is something closer to a partnership than a piece of equipment. Ernie's case put both facts in front of state lawmakers at once.
Ernie's own story did not end on a high note. He retired in October 2020, and shortly after the department submitted a proposal to the Ben Roethlisberger Foundation seeking support for his retirement, he was diagnosed with cancer. He died on January 29, 2021. The foundation, founded by the former Miami University quarterback, nonetheless awarded the Covington Police Department a $10,000 grant that year to help train his successor, K-9 Duke, and to support the department's other K-9 partners, Holly and Zino. At the time, Chief Robert Nader noted that the K-9 unit was in its 52nd year of service.
The new dog park is not Covington's first. That distinction belongs to the SFC Jason Bishop Memorial Dog Park, which opened at 847 Philadelphia Street in December 2022 — named for the Army sergeant first class and 1993 Holmes High School graduate killed by a bomb in Iraq in 2006 while serving with the 101st Airborne Division. Covington, in other words, has developed a habit of naming its dog parks after locals who gave something outsized back to the city. Ernie fits that pattern, even if he was the four-legged variety.
The K-9 Ernie Memorial Dog Park was led by the city's Public Works Department and Parks and Recreation Division, and funding for it was made a priority by the Board of Commissioners during the Fiscal Year 2027 budget process. The Board of Commissioners chose the name. The result is a park with the features that matter to dog owners: separate areas so small dogs are not overwhelmed by large ones, water fountains, and benches for the humans who bring them.
The ribbon-cutting is free and open to the public. It is, on one level, just a neighborhood park opening on a Tuesday afternoon in South Covington. On another, it is a city putting a name on a piece of ground so that people walking their own dogs past it will ask who Ernie was — and get told about the night he took two bullets and came back to work anyway, and about the law that bears his name.