ROCHESTER, N.Y. – A Purple Heart recipient, a retired MMA fighter, and a teacher walk into a room. It’s not the start of a joke, it’s a real-life anti-bullying initiative called Sweethearts and Heroes that has made its way into schools across our region. The three men who run it inspire students to stick up for one another, but as News10NBC’s Jennifer Lewke learned, it was a dog that helped inspire one of them to stick up for himself.

In many cases, one of the first questions the Sweethearts and Heroes team gets is: What happened to Army Sgt. Rick Yarosh?

“My vehicle that I was in was hit with an IED, caught on fire instantly, hit our fuel tank the explosion did… I escaped out of the top of the vehicle but when I got to the top, I had to get to the ground and I jumped and when I did I broke my leg and it ended up in an amputation of my right leg below my knee, I ended up in the hospital for 6 months,” Yarosh explains. 

While he’s very open about it now, that wasn’t always the case. When he returned home, Sgt. Yarosh was alone.

“I looked into getting a service dog for my hands… the use of my hands is not that great so, a service dog could help,” he recalls. 

He worked with a program called Puppies Behind Bars where incarcerated men and women train puppies to become service dogs. That’s where he found Amos.

“You could just see the love that this inmate put into Amos and it was like his kid,” Yarosh remembers.

An instant connection between the three and it wasn’t long before Amos hit the road to schools across the country.

“When I first got him, I wasn’t speaking to young kids, kindergarteners, ya know, elementary school students just because of the way I look and I was afraid of what I would do to them, I don’t want to scare little kids so I wouldn’t do the elementary schools,” Yarosh says.

 It was Amos who gave Rick the courage and confidence to step forward.

“This dog comes out and he’s so friendly and then I would come out behind Amos and all the kids would look at me and ah, and then oh my gosh look at the dog,” Yarosh said. “He was a part of the program, he’d get up on stage and would show all the students that he could solute, and he showed that he could put his paws on the wall and you could search him because he came from a prison and just some funny things that the inmate had actually taught him to do, I would say who is your daddy? And he would bark at me so the kids loved him.”

The black lab traveled nearly 100,000 miles, he was the bridge from military to motivational speaker for Sgt. Yarosh… a bridge named Amos.

And that’s the name of the new book that Rick wrote to share their story of friendship. Sadly, Amos died just as the book went to print in October. But that doesn’t make the story any less special.

“I’m super excited about the book and super excited to keep his legacy alive,” Yarosh says.

A legacy that lives in the pages–and in Rick’s heart.

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