Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Two horse shootings unsolved

The deaths of the horses leave a man and his family heartbroken.

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published September 9, 2005

RIVERVIEW - Feliciano Morales doesn't know who shot the horses and he doesn't know why. But he does know one thing about them.

"It's somebody with no heart," he said.

Police say someone drove by this patch of land off 66th Street last month and opened fire. The 5-year-old horse Morales called La Negra died right away. Another horse, 2-year-old Francisco Danny, was hit in the knee. It took a week before Morales was forced to put him down.

Francisco Danny was one of first horses Morales, 42, of Tampa, had ever owned. He grew up on a ranch in Mexico and came to this country at age 20 in 1983. He said he has always loved animals and hoped to someday have his own farm.

Two years ago, he said, he heard about a man who was selling two horses for $800 each.

The horses - La Pinta and her foal, Francisco Danny - became his.

Morales' employer, Creative Concrete and Excavation, let him keep the horses on a patch of land next door to its headquarters on 66th Street. The rent is nominal, about $50 a month. But Morales, a supervisor for the company, said he usually pays it in overtime.

In the following two years, La Pinta had a foal, named La Muneca, and Morales acquired another horse, La Negra, as well as five cows.

On the weekends, Morales brings his three children - ages 10, 8 and 3 - to the little field in Riverview to visit all the livestock. He's teaching them to ride, he said, and to care for the animals.

When he finally put down Francisco Danny, Morales said he paid for a veterinarian to do it, so that the horse wouldn't suffer - even though the fee would buy a month's worth of food for all the animals. His children begged him not to kill the horse, he said.

"They said, "Daddy, don't kill it, don't kill it,"' he recalled.

So before the vet administered the injection, they took a picture of Francisco Danny. "That way, they'll remember," he said.

Since the horses were killed, Hillsborough County sheriff's deputies have been looking for the shooter - somebody driving a silver Lincoln Town Car or Crown Victoria, said spokeswoman Debbie Carter.

Anyone with any information in reference to this incident is asked to call the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office at 247-8000 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-873-8477.

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at srosenbaum@sptimes.com or by calling 661-2442.

[Last modified September 8, 2005, 10:43:08]