Injured K-9 handler wins disability benefits appeal

The Morris County officer was injured while preventing his dog from attacking a trooper.

A Morris County sheriff’s detective injured while stopping his K-9 from attacking a state trooper is entitled to accidental disability retirement benefits, a New Jersey appellate court has ruled.

Det. Michael Carbone had spent more than eight years with the Morris County Sheriff’s Office, including seven as a K-9 handler, before a Sept. 22, 2020, incident during a police search left him with a partially torn tendon in his right elbow.

That day, Carbone’s K-9, Loco, charged toward a New Jersey state trooper after mistaking the officer for a criminal. Carbone yanked hard on the powerful Dutch shepherd’s leash to stop him, tearing the tendon in the process.

The injury rendered Carbone permanently and totally disabled from performing his usual duties or any other available duties the sheriff’s office was willing to assign him.

In May 2022, Carbone applied for accidental disability retirement benefits, which would provide him with more compensation than ordinary disability retirement benefits. But the state Treasury Department’s Board of Trustees of the Police and Firemen’s Retirement System denied his request.

Carbone met five of the six criteria necessary to receive accidental disability retirement benefits, but the board found he did not meet the sixth because the event that caused his disability was not “undesigned and unexpected.” The board instead granted him ordinary disability retirement benefits.

Carbone appealed, but a judge from the Office of Administrative Law sided with the board in April 2025. The judge was not convinced Carbone’s sudden retraction of Loco’s leash and the dog’s violent stop were undesigned and unexpected events.

The appellate court disagreed, concluding that Carbone was entitled to accidental disability retirement benefits. The judges said an officer can qualify for the benefits even when an injury occurs while performing routine duties.

Carbone’s hazardous profession “does not make him more or less likely to have experienced an unexpected or undesigned event while performing his duties,” the three-judge panel wrote in its Sept. 11 decision.

“It is the unexpected nature of the triggering event, not the inherent dangerousness of the applicant’s duties, that is most significant to analysis,” the judges wrote.

The court focused on what happened after Carbone released Loco to search for a suspect. Carbone discovered a state trooper standing in a building about 25 feet from the dog as Loco raced to apprehend his target.

Carbone had warned the troopers that Loco couldn’t distinguish a police officer from a suspect once deployed and would bite anyone in the search area. He had also given other officers at the scene the proper warnings before letting the potentially deadly K-9 loose, the judges wrote.

When Loco took off toward the trooper, Carbone had to yank hard on the leash to stop the shepherd from biting the officer and potentially being shot. That resulted in the “significant external force of Loco coming to a sudden stop … and violently writhing to attack the trooper,” the judges wrote.

The judges said the record did not show Carbone could recall Loco under those circumstances with verbal commands alone. They also found there was no reason for Carbone to expect the troopers to ignore his warnings to clear the area because the dog couldn’t distinguish police officers from suspects once released.

Carbone had never been trained to yank the leash back that way because doing so could have killed or maimed Loco and would be considered abusive in other circumstances, according to the judges.

“The record supports the conclusion (that) the unexpected and undesigned event that resulted in petitioner’s disability was his need to use a violent method in stopping Loco from causing serious physical harm to another officer,” the appellate judges wrote.