Posted on 05/08/2008 4:08:04 PM PDT by MtnClimber
An arrest warrant has been issued for Austin, Texas, businessman Jeffrey Scott Hawn in connection with the shooting of 32 bison in Park County in March.
The warrant says Hawn is wanted on one count of felony theft, one count of felony criminal mischief and 32 counts of aggravated cruelty to animals, a Class 6 felony.
The bison were shot and killed on private ranches and state and federal lands about 15 miles southeast of Hartsel.
At the time of the shootings, Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener said his deputies had never seen anything like it.
"There are just hundreds of acres with carcasses laying out there," said Wegener. "There are carcasses and hides."
The 14 hunters suspected of shooting the bison belonging to ranchers Monte and Tracy Downare were camped at the nearby Hawn Ranch.
(Excerpt) Read more at denverpost.com ...
Finally some action on this!
They killed Buffy! You bastards!
I'm mentally reliving that scene from "Dances with Wolves"..."We must find these people..."...
Good work.
Ping.
Dang! Ya beat me to it! LOL!!! ;)
Jeffrey Scott Hawn will be busy for the next few years ?
shareholder and manager of Wateredge Properties better have lots of insurance and extra cash
Businessman Jeffrey Scott Hawn from Austin is an elitist
"carpet-bagger" Texan acting like
a "carpet-bagger" Californian.Good money sez he is a Democrat !
"We're on it!"
This is great news. Hawn found some people that aren’t going to put up with his “not me” attitude. Even if he’s not convicted this will be very unpleasant for him, and expensive.
Thanks for the ping, George.
pingie!
Attachmate Corp
Type Private
Founded Bellevue, Washington, 1981
Headquarters Seattle, Washington
Key people Jeff Hawn, President and CEO;
I’d still like to know how many times the buffalo have went through the fence onto his property.
34 felony counts is pretty good. I don’t know the possible sentences, but Hawn is probably thinking “I’m not going to be in Austin for a while”. If the trial is held around Fairplay, CO lets hope the same sense of fair play holds that resulted in the town getting its name!
Eleventh Judicial District:Fremont, Chaffee, Park and Custer County
If the trial is in the Psark Combined Court it will be in Fairplay. There is a chance for fair play.
I'm sure it will be filed by the 11th District DA.If he judged by his peers : ranchers, He is deep DOODOO
South Park has had bison herds for many years.
Another very rich 'city slicker' who thinks it is he who makes the rules. And with all his money, he probably thinks he can buy his way out of anything. I'm thinking he is laughing all the while down in Austin, daring the law to do anything against him.
The bison were doing what bison do. It was up to the 'city slicker' to keep them out.
I was also thinking that the ranchers and others in the small towns around South Park will not take kindly to a liberal city slicker coming in and shooting someone’s bison herd.
I am interested in the relationship between Hawn and the 14 "hunters". I've not seen anything on that. Did he pay them? Did they pay him?
Park County Judge Stephen Groome signed a warrant Thursday for Hawn’s arrest
That's not real neighborly.
32 head of Bison does not equate with hundreds of acres of carcasses. Its not a particularly good situation, but does it require deceptive reporting? I get a laugh out of the D.A.’s inventive charging. I realize that the meat appears to have been wasted and that Hawn has apparantly deprived the owner of the use and benefit of his beef, but to try to hold Hawn responsible on a lesser felony of cruelty when he did not participate in the “hunt” is a grand stand for emotion by the prosecution. What’s wrong with the class 3 felony for theft in an amount greater than $15,000.
Investigators determined the bison had been killed over the course of a number of weeks.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation also matched a bullet cartridge case found on Forest Service land near the scene of dead bison to a 30.06 rifle found in Hawn’s home. A bullet also recovered from a dead bison was similar to a test bullet fired from Hawn’s rifle, according to the affidavit for an arrest warrant.
The names of the hunters were revealed in the arrest affidavit as Antonino Salcedo, Tomas Itsa Shash, Collin Emory Tonozzi, Zachary Richard Rolloff, Mark W. Akins, Russell James Akins, Nathaniel Joel Herbst, Jesus Antonio Cisneros, Mark Dennis Quintana, Jon Lee Duran, Paul Bryan Borquez, Carson Levi Ford, Kenneth Scott Rathbun and Chet Gladstone.
Gore declined to comment if charges would be brought against the hunters.
http://www.theflume.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=5172
In a Feb. 25 letter addressed to Antonino Salcedo, Hawn gave permission to Salcedo and his "Atzlan Native Community" colleagues, based in Gardner, Colo., to "remove the buffalo from my ranch."Illegal Alien invaders slaughtered the Bison
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The city boy is going to have a real hard time getting around the case and bullet matching the rifle in his house and the permission letter. He probably wishes he’d never bought land there now. :)
Yah... The “cruelty” charge is a little bizarre. Shooting an animal cannot be construed as cruel in any legal, theoretical or practical sense. Unless of course they were deliberately shooting to wound or using a weapon inappropriate to the type of animal, none of which is in evidence here.
That said, its clearly a bad neighborly thing to do. Plenty of other felonies to construct here I should think.
That is not cruel is it? To slaughter some one else's livestockSo I can shoot your dog if he comes in my yard.
in a ranching community
is cruel and not real neighborly.
For him to hire poor deluded marxist chicanos from Gardner, Colorado,
a small historic town in Huerfano county and lie to them to slaughter his
neighbor's livestock will only cause deeper feelings to be stirred.
In an affidavit requesting the arrest warrant, a Park County sheriff’s investigator described how one of the 14 hunters who killed the buffalo had a letter from Hawn giving them permission to conduct the bison hunt.
The Feb. 25 letter was sent to Antonio Salcedo of the “Aztlan Native Community” in Gardner Colorado.
“No governmental entity has jurisdiction over trespassing buffalo onto my private lands,” Hawn wrote. “As a result, it is up to me, as the landowner, to determine how to remove the buffalo. My repeated efforts, and that of my attorney, to enlist the aid of the former owner of the buffalo, have failed.”
The letter asks Salcedo to “get started as quickly as possible.” Hawn asked that the hunters call to let him know when they were on site. He also offered to contact Salcedo when the buffalo were spotted on Hawn’s property, “so as to enhance your chances of a successful capture or hunt.”
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/may/08/charges-filed-bison-shootings/
One of the shooters, identified in the affidavit as Antonino Salcedo, immediately turned over a letter written by Stephen Csajaghy, a Denver lawyer, and signed by his client, Jeff Hawn.
“I ask that you get started as quickly as possible,” the letter said, adding that “we will contact you by telephone when we see buffalo on the ranch so as to enhance your chances at a successful capture or hunt.”
No fool, Antonino Salcedo liked the idea of getting free bison meat, but wanted a notarized letter from John Norman granting him and his pals permission for the hunt. It was provided.
On that March 19 morning, though, Salcedo and the others arrived to find at least 16 bison already lying dead, none even remotely dressed out for harvest.
They went on their hunt, anyway.
They would shoot others on the Hawn property, adjacent Bureau of Land Management lands and on neighboring property. By the time investigators sorted it all out, at least seven of the 16 cow bison killed prior to March 19 were about to calve.
According to the affidavit, Jeff Hawn had arrived in Colorado on Continental Airlines from Texas on Feb. 25. Witnesses told deputies they saw Jeff Hawn on his property around that time, carrying a 30.06 rifle. On March 27, deputies conducted a search of Hawn’s home, finding the rifle and boxes of 30.06 shells.
Subsequent testing of the slugs taken from the 16 dead bison made them a match for Jeff Hawn’s rifle, the affidavit states.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/may/08/johnson-bison-slaying-old-west-feud/
So you’re willing to concede that hunting deer with a rifle is “cruelty”? I’m not.
If killing bison with a rifle is officially defined by a court as “cruel”, then so is killing anything else with a rifle. Get it?
That it was somebody else’s bison and utterly wrong is true, but not my point. This guy is a dirtbag. What he did is inexcusable. But to reach into the legal toolkit and grab onto the “cruelty to animals” laws isn’t the right tool for this job.
A marxist control freak from Austin, TX.... using reconquista propaganda against legitimate land owners...surprise, surprise. I wonder if the fencing was cut on purpose. Could even have been done to stir up the reconquista sentiment in the latino-marxist community just as others like Charles Manson or the Black Panthers that tried to stir up race wars in the past. Just saying it seems to smell of the past.
I predict they will have a very hard time getting aggravated cruelty to stick. They will have to prove that animals suffered inhumanely past the initial shot. Without witnesses or VERY good forensics this will be hard. If they found them wounded walking around three days later then yea it would stick. Everybody that is jumping for joy here had better be careful. They could easily take a prosecution win in this case and use it against legal hunting.
A 30-06 is kind of "light weight" for bison. It certainly would be cruel if he was shooting them with a .22LR. See Chuck Hawk's column on bison hunting here. He admits something as light as a 30-06 or 270 could do the job, but recommends 338 Mag, 450 Marlin or larger. See the link for the fine details.
That will depend on how much cash he has for lawyers and who his friends are. Remember these were animals that were killed, not infant babies.
You may not understand the gravity of this as this is ranching country
They are going to throw the book at some snot-nosed
city slicker from Texas who hired an ignorant lawyer who does not know
the Law.Colorado is a "fence out" state, meaning property owners are charged with the task of fencing their property to keep livestock out. The rancher isn't required to fence his or her livestock in. According to Colorado state law, a lawful fence is a "well constructed three barbed wired fence with a substantial post set at a distance of approximately twenty feet apart, and sufficient to turn ordinary horses and cattle, with all gates equally as good as the fence..."They have hard evidence that Hawn shot 16 of his neighbor's livestockThe fence was unable to keep the bison off of Hawn's property.
Downare told The Flume last month that the fence constructed by Hawn wasn't a legal fence.
with his own gun and did not take the meat.This may not mean anything to a city dweller, but here in Colorado
it is not real neighborly to take it upon yourself to slaughter your
neighbor's livestock and then not take the meat.
I think you have put your finger on it !
Did they check for Visitors? Lol.
CONCERNING CRUELTY TO ANIMALS in the CRS
I’m sure there’s good discussion to be had with regard to the proper caliber to hunt bison. But I don’t think there’s a fair argument to the effect that a 30-06 is inherently “cruel” by being too small. Sure, a 45-70 might be better, but an ‘06 still hits plenty hard.
The definition includes acts of: 1) knowingly torturing an animal; or 2) knowingly and needlessly killing, mutilating, or inflicting serious physical harm on an animal. From the Colorado Revised Statutes
Aggravated cruelty to animals.
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