2020.0205.0440...

Who’s killing horses in Central Florida? A mystery terrifies owners.

By Jack Evans - Feb. 4, 2020

ZEPHYRHILLS — The Rottweilers’ barking woke Brena Kramer in the darkest part of the January morning, but it was when they fell silent that she got worried. They were chasing something.

She stepped onto the big screened porch and looked toward the barn. A security lamp gave off the only light. Across the yard, she heard an unusual sound — one of the horses shuffling anxiously in his stall.

Five years earlier, Kramer had turned this property, set back off a railroad access drive, into her dream: a horse rehabilitation center. She took horses nobody else would, ones that needed up to a year of treatment. It was nonstop work, but nothing else gave her the same joy as connecting with horses that had been abused, neglected, sometimes left to die.

They’d need to be fed soon, anyway, so she crossed the backyard. She kept the barn lights off — after years of routine, she could go by feel and save electricity. She worked her way around the stalls until she came to the last horse, Gus, a chestnut gelding who she’d rescued from a kill pen. Without her, he would’ve been sent to Mexico to be butchered.

Kramer reached up to feed Gus and kicked a hay bag. Her senses lit up: She’d left the bag hanging on a hook in Gus’s stall. She flipped on the lights, and the whole scene hit her at once: hay and treats littering the ground; leads and halters, which she never used except in moving horses off the property, scattered about; and Gus, bound by ropes to two sides of his stall.

She called the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office and told deputies what she thought had happened. Someone had tried to kill her horses.

Buying and selling horse meat is effectively illegal in the U.S., but slaughter had been on the minds of many in the Central Florida horse community lately. In the span of a couple of weeks, horses in three counties had been stolen, killed and butchered, ravaged bodies or severed heads left behind. The news rattled owners and caretakers who feared they’d be next.

The first body was found on Thanksgiving Day in a pasture south of Ocala. It belonged to HotRod, a 21-year-old paint gelding, according to news reports. Someone had removed his skin. The cuts were clean.

Four days later, someone forced through a locked gate on a farm in Palmetto and stole a horse. One of the owners found the horse butchered in a nearby field, said Steve Stephens, a friend and neighbor. In an incident report, Manatee County Sheriff’s deputies wrote that the killers had “harvested most of the meat.”

Then, on Dec. 11, a Bushnell horse boarder woke to find that one of the horses on her property, 11-year-old Jayda, was missing. She followed tracks and droppings across the street and through a cut fence onto another property, until she reached a creek a half-mile in. Knowing Jayda feared water, she followed the edge of the creek to a hastily constructed pile of branches. Underneath, she found the horse’s mangled corpse.

On Facebook, frightened horse owners posted about unsettling incidents in other counties — a fence cut in Brooksville, suspicious passersby in Plant City. They speculated about ritual sacrifice and posited that the killings might be the work of one person moving up and down I-75. Some posted the license plates of cars they said had driven by their properties too slowly. One user said she trailed a “suspicious” vehicle for miles, to let the driver know they’d been seen.

Kristine Wake, a Central Florida mortgage broker who has owned horses for more than 30 years, watched the posts. She belonged to a few Facebook groups for area horse lovers, and she was friends with many in the horse community. But it was hard to keep up with so many sources of information, hard to tell what was new or old, to distinguish what was legitimate from what wasn’t.

So Wake created a Facebook group, Keeping Florida Horses Safe, to keep track of all the suspicious-activity reports. She planned to send each of them to law enforcement agencies, knowing that many horse owners would complain on Facebook but never go through official channels.

Within three weeks, the page had 3,000 members and hundreds of more requests awaiting approval.

Some posters advocated for a shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach to deterring horse thieves. Wake had to urge the group to stay vigilant but not become vigilantes.

“I worry that someone is going to take the law into their own hands,” she said, “and the law isn’t going to protect them.”

Read remainder of (somewhat long) article HERE.

Personally, I feel a "shoot-first, ask-questions-later"
approach to deterring horse thieves is a good idea.