Part 2: A Retired K9 Cop Carried His 85-Pound German Shepherd Outside Every Morning to Lie in the Sun — When the Reporter Asked Him Why, He Said One Sentence That Got 15 Million Views

I’m Lara Whitmore. I’m a feature reporter at the Arizona Daily Star.

What I am telling you, I am telling you in pieces — pieces from Marcus, pieces from his retired sergeant, pieces from his neighbor Brenda Castillo who filmed the original clip, and pieces from the dog himself, who I have now sat in the sun with on three separate Saturday mornings.

I will tell it in order.

For the first two years after retirement, Rex was, as Marcus put it to me, “still Rex.” He moved a little slower. His shoulder caught in cold weather. He still walked the perimeter of Marcus’s small back yard every morning before settling. He still sat on Marcus’s left side when guests came over — the working position. He still alerted to the front door with one sharp bark.

He was a working dog with a working dog’s retirement, which is no retirement at all. He was just doing the same job for a smaller jurisdiction.

Then the third year started.

Rex was eleven by then. The arthritis that had been threading through his back hips for the last two years arrived all at once one cold week in February. He could no longer get up from a lying position by himself. His back legs would not respond. He would try, three or four times, to lift his hindquarters, and his front paws would scrabble on the tile, and he would lie back down and look at Marcus with calm amber eyes that said, I cannot do this part anymore.

Marcus took him to the vet on Speedway. The vet — a woman named Dr. Beattie who had been Rex’s K9 veterinarian for eight years and was now his civilian one — said that Rex’s hips were grade four out of four. There were medications they could try. There was hydrotherapy. There was, eventually, a conversation about quality of life that all of us were going to have to have.

Marcus drove home. Rex lay on the back seat of his pickup truck the way Rex had always lain on the back seat of his pickup truck. Calm. On his right side. Eyes half closed.

Marcus parked in his driveway. He looked at his dog in the rearview mirror.

He told me later, “Lara. I sat in that truck for about ten minutes. And I made a decision. I made a decision that this dog was not going to be carried only twice in his life — once when he was a puppy from the breeder to my squad car, and once at the end. I decided I was going to carry him as much as he needed.”

He got out of the truck.

He opened the back door.

He slid his hands under Rex’s body the way he had been trained to handle a wounded K9.

He carried his eighty-five-pound retired partner up the driveway and into the house.

That was Tuesday.

The next morning he carried Rex out into the back yard.

He has not stopped.

For ten months, Marcus did the same thing every single morning.

At 7 a.m., he got up. He made coffee. He drank it standing at the kitchen counter looking out the window at the back yard, which is small and rectangular and has one mature mesquite tree in the back corner that throws a soft dappled patch of shade over a stretch of crabgrass and Bermuda lawn.

At 7:15 a.m., he walked into the living room. Rex would be on his bed — a thick orthopedic foam pad with a memory-foam topper that Marcus had ordered online specifically for old K9s. Rex would lift his head when Marcus came in. His tail would thump twice against the bed.

Marcus would say, “Morning, partner. Ready?”

Rex would breathe out — a soft sound that wasn’t quite a sigh and wasn’t quite a yes.

Marcus would kneel down. He would slide his right arm under Rex’s chest and his left arm under Rex’s hindquarters. He would lift, the way he had been trained — straight up with his legs, never with his back, even though his back was the thing the department had retired him for.

He would carry his eighty-five-pound partner across the living room, through the sliding glass door he had already opened, down the two concrete steps of his back patio, across the small back yard, and to the patch of grass under the mesquite tree where the morning sun came through the branches in a pattern of gold and shadow.

He would lower Rex onto the grass.

Rex would lie there. Sometimes his eyes would close. Sometimes they would track a hummingbird at the feeder on the back fence. Sometimes he would look up at Marcus with the same calm amber expression he had used in the back of the truck on that February afternoon.

Marcus would kneel down next to him. He would scratch behind Rex’s left ear — the side that had taken the bottle in 2018. He would say, very quietly, “I got you, partner. I got you.”

Then Marcus would go back inside and start his day.

In the afternoon, when the sun moved off the mesquite and the heat started to come up, Marcus would come out and carry Rex back inside.

He did this every single day.

He had no idea anyone was watching.

Brenda Castillo is sixty-seven years old. She is a retired second-grade teacher. She has lived in the small adobe-style house next to Marcus’s for thirty-one years.

Her kitchen window looks directly into Marcus’s back yard.

She had watched Marcus’s career from her kitchen window for sixteen years. She had watched him come home in a black-and-white squad car at odd hours. She had watched a younger Rex jump out of the back of that car with the controlled energy of a working dog. She had watched Marcus and Rex, on hot summer evenings, play tug with a thick rope toy on this same patch of grass.

She had also watched the third year start.

She had seen the carrying.

For about four months, she watched it through her kitchen window without saying anything. She told me later that she had not wanted to embarrass Marcus. She had not wanted to be the kind of neighbor who interfered.

Then, in late October, she watched Marcus carry Rex out one Tuesday morning, lower him onto the grass, kneel beside him, and stay kneeling for about three minutes longer than usual.

She could see, through her kitchen window, that Marcus was crying.

He was scratching behind Rex’s left ear and he was crying. Rex was looking up at him with those steady amber eyes.

Brenda told me, in her kitchen later, “Honey. I have been a teacher for forty-one years. I know when somebody is in the middle of something they need recorded and don’t know how to ask.”

She picked up her phone.

She filmed thirty-eight seconds of it through her kitchen window.

She did not film the crying. She filmed the carrying. She filmed Marcus, in a faded gray TPD T-shirt and athletic shorts, lifting an eighty-five-pound German Shepherd off the grass and carrying him back across the yard, up the patio steps, and into the house.

She uploaded it to her Facebook page that night with a caption that read: My neighbor was a K9 cop. His old partner can’t walk anymore. He carries him out to lie in the sun every morning and back inside every afternoon. I’ve watched him do this every day for ten months. I just wanted somebody to see it.

The video had eleven thousand shares by morning.

It had two million views by Wednesday.

It had fifteen million by Friday.

Marcus did not know any of this.

He found out when his retired sergeant called him on Friday afternoon and said, “Marc. You’re famous.”

Marcus said, “I’m what?”

His sergeant said, “Get on Facebook.”

A reporter from KOLD News 13 was at his door by 5 p.m. that evening. She was respectful. She apologized for showing up unannounced. She asked Marcus if he was willing to say a few words.

Marcus thought about it for a few seconds.

Then he said, “Yeah. I’ll say a few words. Come around to the back. Rex is out.”

He sat on the back patio with the reporter, and Rex was on the grass under the mesquite tree, and the camera caught the late afternoon light, and the reporter asked him the question that has been asked of police officers and soldiers and firefighters since the beginning of those professions.

She said, “Officer Avila. Why are you doing this for him?”

Marcus looked at Rex.

Then he looked back at the camera and gave the answer that, when the local clip ran on the Friday 6 p.m. news and was reuploaded to Facebook with subtitles, sent the original Brenda video — the one without sound — back into circulation and pushed it to 15 million views.

He said, “For eight years Rex protected me. For eight years he jumped fences for me. Cleared rooms for me. Took a bullet for me in 2020. Ran faster than bullets for me. Now he can’t stand up by himself.”

He said, “So I lift him.”

He said, “That’s not sacrifice. That’s repayment.”

I want to tell you what I asked Marcus, in the second of the three interviews I did with him for this paper.

I asked him whether he ever thought, in the eight years they worked together, that this was how it was going to end.

Marcus thought about it.

He said, “Lara. Every K9 handler thinks about it. Every one of us. We think about it the day we sign the partnership paperwork. We know the dog will retire before us. We know we will outlive the dog. The math is in the application.”

He said, “But you don’t think about the carrying part. You think about the goodbye part.”

He said, “The carrying part is what nobody told me about.”

He paused.

He said, “And the carrying part is the part I don’t want to give back.”

I asked him what he meant by that.

He said, “Lara. Picking him up every morning is the closest I have ever felt to being even with him. He carried me through eight years. I literally watched him take a bullet that was coming at my head. There is no version of that I can pay back. There just isn’t. The math doesn’t work.”

He said, “But every morning that I lift him to the grass, and every evening that I lift him back, I get to feel like I’m a little bit closer to even. I’m not. But I get to feel like it.”

He said, “That’s why I’m not putting him on a stretcher. That’s why I’m not buying a wagon. People have offered me wagons, Lara. People have offered me wheelchairs. They mean well. They want to make it easier on me.”

He said, “But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s hard. The point is that my back hurts and my shoulder hurts and I do it anyway. The point is that he carried me when it was hard for him.”

He said, “That’s the whole point of partnership. You take a turn.”

Rex died three months after the video went viral.

It was a Wednesday in late February, almost exactly a year to the day after the morning Marcus had first carried him out of the truck.

Marcus had carried him out into the back yard at 7:15 a.m. as he always did. He had laid him on the grass under the mesquite. He had scratched behind his left ear. He had said, “I got you, partner.”

Rex had closed his eyes in the sun.

Marcus had gone inside to make a second cup of coffee.

When he came out at 8:30 a.m. to check on him — which was unusual; he didn’t usually check until afternoon — he knew before he reached the grass.

Rex’s chest was not moving.

Marcus knelt down on the grass next to him.

He stayed there.

He did not pick up his phone. He did not call the vet. He did not call his sergeant. He did not call me.

He lay down next to Rex on the grass under the mesquite tree.

He stayed there for the rest of the day.

Brenda saw him through her kitchen window. She did not film it. She closed her curtain and made him a casserole.

The sun moved across the sky. The shadow of the mesquite moved with it. Marcus did not move.

At sunset, Marcus stood up.

He bent down. He slid his arms under Rex one last time. He carried him across the yard, up the patio steps, and into the living room.

He laid him on the orthopedic bed.

He said, very quietly, very clearly, into the empty room:

“Good boy. You’re off duty.”

Then he sat down on the couch next to the bed and he stayed there until morning.

Marcus has a new German Shepherd now.

His name is Gunner. He’s eighteen months old. A trainee from a working line in Texas. He is not a service dog. He is not a police dog. He is a pet — Marcus’s first, in his entire life, that has not been a working dog.

Marcus told me, the last time I sat in his back yard, “I’m going to teach this one to lie in the sun. From day one.”

Gunner is on the grass right now as I am writing this. The same patch of crabgrass and Bermuda. Under the same mesquite.

Marcus is on the patio with a mug of coffee. He is watching Gunner the way he used to watch Rex.

There is a small bronze plaque mounted on the trunk of the mesquite tree.

It reads: REX. K9 #427. 2014–2025. Off duty.

Gunner walks over to the plaque. He sniffs it. He sits down beneath it.

Marcus does not say anything.

He takes a slow sip of his coffee.

He looks up at the sun.

If you want to see Rex now — in the videos Marcus has shared, the way Rex tilted his head when his name was called, the eight years he served Tucson, the life he was still living right up to that final morning under the mesquite — I’ve shared the tribute Marcus posted in the comments.