Name: Longtime Florida crime trend emerges in Houston — leaving butchered horses in its wake
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Longtime Florida crime trend emerges in Houston — leaving butchered horses in its wake

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Carl Smith got a strange call from someone who rented a spot at his west Pearland horse barn on Sunday afternoon. The renter asked the retired Harris County Precinct 5 deputy constable if he had two of his horses with him. At home in Houston, Smith knew something was wrong.Driving up the path to the barn, he didn’t get his usual greeting from his four-legged children. Storm and Shorty were nowhere to be found. He called out to them. He looked for them in the shady spots. On the west side, the fence had been cut. It was strange, he thought, because the two weren’t close like that— not after Storm had kicked Shorty’s eye out a few years ago while in heat. They wouldn’t have run away together.Smith traversed the property for hours before calling in Pearland police.Around 5:30 p.m., Smith found his two beloved horses slaughtered in a wooded area half a mile from his main property. The horses had been stabbed in the chest, and their hindquarters and backstraps had been removed.The two are the latest in a string of horse slaughters in the Pearland area since May and are thought to have been butchered for their meat, raising concerns from horse owners, police and the community. In at least three of the five killings, including Smith’s equines, the horse was stabbed first and its hindquarters removed.The killings began May 22 when a horse was found dead along the Sam Houston Tollway. On June 10, Pearland police found another butchered in the 14000 block of Kirby Drive, just east of Hooper Road. The horse had also been stabbed. On June 29, another horse was found along the toll road.Jason Wells, who has been with the Pearland Police Department since 2002, said he’s never seen anything like this. The department’s public information officer said such slaughtering practices have apparently been an issue in Florida for years and have recently been used in New Mexico and now the Houston area.Whoever killed Smith’s horses clearly knew what they were doing and made “very, very precise” cuts, Wells said. “The way the meat was removed — it was done with care.”Richard “Kudo” Couto has spent more than a decade working on this issue in Florida, and is one of the foremost experts on horse slaughter. He guesses that between 30,000 and 40,000 horses a year are funneled through the state’s black market meat trade.Couto founded the Animal Recovery Mission and ARM Sanctuary and also works undercover to catch horse killers. Currently, the west coast of Florida is struggling with horses being stolen “left and right, almost on a daily basis,” he said.Generally, the horses are stabbed in the heart rather than shot so as not to awake owners and neighbors, which means horses can take up to 20 minutes to die. But that also suggests the horses are still alive while they’re butchered, Couto explained.Once the highly valuable meat is cut off, it is often sold for medicinal and “magical” purposes — as a cure for disease or even for libido problems.Couto also suggested that it’s likely whoever killed the horses knew the property well — either because they cased it, or had worked on the land, or knew the owner. “They know that there are horses on the property, they know where the stalls are, they know where the fences are to cut,” he said. “They know the property very well.”“If this isn’t a common crime in Houston, it may well be transplants from Florida,” said Couto. He suggested a guard dog and good security lights for protection against horse thieves.In Pearland, businesses are also concerned about the killings.“We’re just aghast, appalled,” said Debby Shawhan, owner of D&amp;D Feed, an animal feed store in the Pearland area. “It’s disgusting.”She has many customers who are horse owners, but none who have been impacted by the recent killings.Smith has no idea who killed his horses, but he does think they were slaughtered early Sunday, between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. based on stool nearby. Their bodies are still where the killers left them. As Smith walked around the property Tuesday, he noticed a stench.Smith loved his horses and knew them inside and out. But 18-year-old Storm, “the baby” was special. Smith helped deliver her. He named her moments after meeting her for the “storm” of light hair on her forehead.“Everybody knew me riding Storm,” Smith said. “She would walk up to you and kiss you and put her head on your shoulder.”And Shorty, who was 26, was his wife’s favorite. She was the gentle one, the one Smith would put his elderly father, or young kids, on.Since the early 2000s, he’d visit his horses every day to take care of them. He talked about his horses like they were his children, noticing their distinctive personalities and details on their coats. He knew which one would be leading the pack when he drove up — Storm — and which one was the least amount of trouble — Shorty. “We raise these horses and they’re just like family,” Smith said.Smith now joins three other horse owners in the area — Jason Bockel, Tina Amaya and Raymond Breaux — who have had their horses slaughtered in recent months.Smith plans to put in metal fencing at the back of his property and might install cameras, too. He still has one horse, Shine, and four other horses whose owners rent spots at the barn to protect.“I’m pretty much worried about all of them — everybody’s horses — now,” Smith said.currie.engel@chron.com

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateCarl Smith got a strange call from someone who rented a spot at his west Pearland horse barn on Sunday afternoon. The renter asked the retired Harris County Precinct 5 deputy constable if he had two of his horses with him. At home in Houston, Smith knew something was wrong.Driving up the path to the barn, he didn’t get his usual greeting from his four-legged children. Storm and Shorty were nowhere to be found. He called out to them. He looked for them in the shady spots. On the west side, the fence had been cut. It was strange, he...

Longtime Florida crime trend emerges in Houston — leaving butchered horses in its wake

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