2 teens charged after pair of horses shot, 1 dead, in Hardin County

Lauren Adams reporting for WLKY Louisville, writes:

HARDIN COUNTY, Ky. — Roy Wright has spent most of his 81 years around horses. He currently has two — Two Buck and Generator. But Generator, he said, isn’t the same horse she was just a few months ago.

Her demeanor, Wright said, changed after she was shot once through the neck last fall.

In November, when Generator and another horse, Sarge were out in the pasture of his Elizabethtown farm, they were shot. Wright was the one to discover Sarge dead the following morning.

“I came back to the house and got my tractor. When I picked him up and saw the other side of him, got to examine him, I saw he’d been shot four times. Four times,” Wright said, adding he thinks of that morning daily.

Sheriff John Ward, whose agency handled the investigation, told WLKY, “We didn’t know why and I can’t imagine Mr. Wright having any enemies. He’s a fine gentleman and we couldn’t figure out what anybody would want to do that to him.”

But, Ward said, thanks to some good detective work, police were able to charge two Radcliff teens, 17 and 19, on Wednesday.

Ward said both teens had been in trouble before. In fact, the 17-year-old was already at a juvenile detention center, on unrelated charges. He and Ethan Woods, 19, are charged with animal cruelty and criminal mischief. Woods is also charged with unlawful transaction with a minor.

“From what we can determine, they were just driving down the road, saw the animals, stopped and shot two horses,” Ward said when asked if the teens had a motive.

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POSTSCRIPT: The reason we are beginning to report these types of shootings is because they have begun to increase at an alarming rate across the country. Some are beginning to call them copycat shootings. — Tuesday’s Horse, the Fund for Horses official blog.