Murder Most Fowl

"It's against the law," Lopez told her. "It doesn't have anything to do with being Mexican or not."

Casillas-Deluicio's nephew, thirty-year-old Francisco Javier Reyes-Garcia, finally showed up. He told the officers that he didn't know who owned the knives and training gloves, and insisted that the chickens were already doctored when he bought them in North Carolina. He said he was just passing through town on his way to Mexico and that the chickens were a gift for his mother in Zacatecas, because they were a better quality than the chickens back home.

 

Animal Control officer J. Lopez made the fowl discovery that led to Francisco Javier Reyes-Garcia and Virginia Casillas-Deluicio being charged with animal fighting.

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More About

• Wayne Allard
• Juan Cisneros
• Jack Cairnes
• Animal Rights
• Animal Cruelty

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But by the time his aunt was busted, he'd already been in Denver for about a month, he says. (A neighbor says she'd heard the crowing for years.) And now he wants to stay here, because his seventeen-year-old girlfriend is pregnant. Reyes-Garcia is in the country illegally, though, and Denver police notified Immigration and Customs Enforcement of his arrest. ICE confirms that he is awaiting deportation while out on a $3,500 bond; he has a date in immigration court scheduled for January.

First, though, both he and his aunt face charges of animal fighting and aggravated cruelty to animals, crimes that carry up to four and a half years in prison. They were in court on September 7 for an arraignment, which was postponed until October 6 because of a change in attorneys.

Rather than pay the $7,000 it would cost to keep the chickens housed and fed while criminal charges were pending, Reyes-Garcia agreed to let the surviving hens be sent to an animal sanctuary on a farm outside of Brighton. The roosters were euthanized.