Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 22, 1995 TAG: 9508220071
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HENDRICKS KANSAS CITY STAR
DATELINE: MOUND CITY, MO. NOTE: BELOW LENGTH: Long
Yellow crime-scene ribbon barred the curious from climbing to the top of Hog Hill last week as Deputy Sheriff Kirby Felumb collected evidence from rotting piles of bones, hair and flesh.
``Items Impounded: 10 skulls of both adult and or babies,'' he scribbled in his notebook. ``Estimated skeletal remains of 1,000 or more in confinement shed.''
In perhaps the worst instance of animal abuse ever reported in Missouri, Holt County authorities believe they have plenty of documentation to prosecute 42-year-old Daryl D. Larson, the man on whose farm all those hogs died this summer.
Yet, with Larson facing arraignment today in Holt County Circuit Court, Felumb and others have yet to answer the most confounding question of all.
How could anyone allow so many animals to starve to death?
``There's just no reason,'' said a Mound City lawyer who represents some of Larson's neighbors. ``No reason at all.''
No reason because authorities believe Larson could have raised cash to feed the hogs. He could have taken out a loan on the farm he owns mortgage-free, or perhaps he could have sold one of his Mercedes-Benzes.
No reason because it was not the first time hogs starved to death at one of Larson's farms. It's happened at least three other times.
Larson, trained as a veterinarian, has not offered any explanation for what happened and his whereabouts was unknown last week. When asked about the case, his attorney, Jerry Drake of Grant City, said only, ``I have nothing to say.''
Yet, there's another thing troubling those who want to make some sense of what happened.
Despite successful efforts to toughen Missouri's animal abuse laws in recent years, what happened on Hog Hill is still a minor offense in the eyes of the law.
The offense carries the same punishment as if one tossed a pop can from a car window. Littering and animal abuse are both Class A misdemeanors.
Having seen the horrors on Hog Hill, acting prosecutor Jerry Biggs is sickened by this last fact the most.
``It's just so frustrating,'' he said. ``But that's the law.''
When a group of area investors built a hog confinement facility atop a Missouri River bluff near Mound City in the late 1970s, neighbors dubbed the farm Hog Hill. And it kept the name even after the business folded and was sold to Larson in 1988.
A 1977 graduate of the University of Minnesota's College of Veterinary Medicine, Larson began his career overseeing turkeys for a large agribusiness firm before branching off on his own as an investor in the swine industry.
By the 1990s, he operated as many as 14 big hog farms on which thousands of hogs were bred and raised inside modern steel barns filled with equipment that fed and watered the animals automatically.
``He picked them up for a little bit of nothing,'' said Andy DeBoer, who ran one of Larson's eastern Iowa hog farms for more than nine years before quitting a year ago. ``He could have made a fortune, if he had just hired the right people to run them for him.''
But according to four current and former business associates, Larson was a poor manager who had a hard time keeping employees. Some quit because they weren't paid, DeBoer and others said. Sometimes they left, as DeBoer did, because Larson did not give them permission to buy supplies such as feed for hungry hogs.
Other details fell through the cracks. Real estate taxes went unpaid on at least two farms. Checks bounced. And as Larson's business empire began to unravel in recent years, animals suffered.
In 1992, Shelby County, Iowa, authorities received complaints that hogs were starving at one of Larson's farms near Irwin, Iowa.
``We got a call about a bunch of dead carcasses around the building,'' said Shelby County Sheriff Gene Cavenaugh. ``We got a search warrant.''
Found were about 300 dead hogs and some survivors that were starving because they had no feed.
The next year, complaints against Larson were lodged in nearby Adair County, Iowa. Once again, authorities found dead hogs at a seemingly abandoned farm.
The Sheriff's Department counted 261 hogs dead of starvation and 46 living but in poor shape. The feed bins were full, but the farm's automatic feeding equipment had been unplugged.
``He had hired employees to take care of them,'' recalls Adair County Attorney Clint Hight, ``but there was some question whether the employees had told him they'd quit.''
Authorities also found dead hogs at an abandoned Larson farm in Carroll County, Iowa, and received reports of problems at other farms as well. But no one did any in-depth investigation. All the cases remained local matters, and Larson's reputation for letting hogs die did not follow him to Holt County.
Larson was known around Mound City for being slow to pay his bills and for bouncing a check at least once. In 1994, he was sentenced to probation for passing a bad check for just over $450 at a gravel pit near Maitland, Mo.
Sheriff's deputies were occasionally on the lookout for Larson's Mercedes sedans - one silver, one blue - so they could serve him with court papers from out of state.
It was only in recent months that they got complaints about the animals he raised on Hog Hill. On April 8, Deputy Felumb rolled up the gravel driveway and was astonished at the growing confusion.
``When I arrived, I was confront[ed] by hogs everywhere,'' his report read. ``These animals were hungry and out of confinement.''
Felumb didn't see any dead ones, but he admonished Larson to take better care of the animals. Larson promised he would.
By July, Larson's hogs were notorious for scooting under the fence and rummaging through the neighbors' cornfields and pastures. They hooved down the gravel road and waddled across Highway 59 and over to Interstate 29.
By late July, the neighbors were so upset by the crop damage that they hired a lawyer, who pressed Holt County authorities for action. But nothing much happened until attorney Pam Vohs contacted Gary Silverglat at M'Shoogy's Emergency Animal Rescue in Savannah, Mo., at 3 p.m. Aug. 4.
A veteran of many animal abuse cases, Silverglat knew the law and convinced Holt County authorities that they had the legal right to get a search warrant and take charge.
Larson wasn't there at 8:30 that Friday night to greet Silverglat, two veterinarians, Sheriff Bernie Delaney and Felumb when they climbed Hog Hill and looked inside the barn.
``As soon as we opened the door,'' Silverglat said, ``we saw dead animals and skeletons all over the place.''
Some had starved to death, but it was hard to tell because most of the bodies had been decomposing for weeks. Some had fallen through holes in the floor into the sewage pit below. A thousand dead? Perhaps more.
``There's no way to count them all,'' Felumb said later. ``God only knows how many fell into the pit, or how many's bones are strewn out in the yard.''
About 200 survivors were fed and then sold off by the Sheriff's Department this week.
Larson was arrested at a truck stop in Iowa, released on bond and now faces 30 counts of animal abuse.
Because Iowa authorities never convicted him of animal cruelty, choosing to file lesser charges of failure to properly dispose of animal carcasses, the Holt County case is considered Larson's first offense of animal abuse. That could result in fines and time in the county jail, but a second offense would have brought a felony charge and a possible prison sentence.
Ann Martin-Gonnerman, president of the National Society for the Protection of Animals in Kansas City, Mo., thinks the Missouri General Assembly should look to the Hog Hill case as a clear example of why the abuse laws should be toughened.
``There are those of us who think it should be a felony on the first offense,'' she said.
Of course, that's an academic question for Deputy Felumb and others who've seen the decayed bodies.
They have only one question.
``Why?''
by CNB