The Killing Field

On a Friday night last December, four high school football heroes clubbed two deer to death. The grisly crime rocked their West Texas town of Iraan—but not nearly as much as the Internet-fueled furor that followed.

by Skip Hollandsworth

August 2008

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What happened was that the Associated Press, relying on the Standard-Times’ article, produced a short story of its own about the killings, its editors no doubt figuring a few Texas newspapers might use it as a back-page filler item. In another era, no doubt, that’s where the Iraan deer killings would have stayed—on the back pages. But today, in the Internet age, any bit of news, even news that takes place in an isolated West Texas town, races around the world in mere minutes, and it wasn’t long before the AP story was bouncing from one Web site to another. It eventually landed on the desks of executives at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who promptly issued an action alert from their headquarters, in Norfolk, Virginia, declaring that the boys were in fact not “good kids” but genuine threats to society. One PETA animal-cruelty caseworker went so far as to suggest that the four were on their way to becoming the next Jeffrey Dahmers. “All of our serious serial killers and school shooters were known to abuse animals before they committed crimes against humans,” she proclaimed in an interview, citing FBI statistics. In another interview, the director of PETA’s Domestic Animal and Wildlife Rescue and Information Department, Daphna Nachminovitch, said the boys needed to be sent to prison. “The terror and agony that these deer experienced,” she said, “demands that the alleged perpetrators be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

If PETA officials were hoping to create a “national media firestorm,” as one West Texas reporter later wrote, they certainly succeeded. Almost immediately, Davis was inundated with several thousand letters and e-mails from animal lovers in nearly every state in the country and from as far away as Australia, most of them demanding that he file animal cruelty charges against the killers and get them off the streets. Some argued that the boys should spend at least 23 months in prison—the very sentence that former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick had received that same month for financing a dogfighting ring and torturing and killing pit bulls. On blog threads and message boards, others made it clear that “the Iraan 4,” as one writer dubbed them, deserved much more than time in the penitentiary. One woman suggested they be sent to Alaska—“or better to far off Siberia.” Another proposed they be beaten exactly how the deer had been, adding, “May I volunteer as the first to swing the bat?”

What particularly outraged people was the premeditated nature of the boys’ outburst. “They must have excitedly locked the gate, and made up a plan as to how to herd the two terrified animals closer and closer to the kill area,” remarked one blogger. “This to them was the height of hilarity and glee.” “Mark my words,” wrote another, “some day a young woman will be beaten like this mother deer and her baby, and that same young man who wielded the baseball bat right before Christmas in 2007 will stand over her and laugh.”

The anger was not just directed at the football players. Critics attacked Iraan itself as a backward, football-crazed town that cared more about the fortunes of the Braves than the pursuit of justice. According to online speculation, the only reason the teenagers hadn’t been expelled from school was that officials wanted them back in uniform for the following season. “This is about adult corruption and failure to lead and enabling killers to run free and prosper,” read one typical rant. “The deer did nothing except suffer mightily and die in pain and confusion. The guilty are doing nothing but laughing and having fun.”

“It’s as if people think we’ve created four monsters down here,” an exasperated superintendent Allen told me when I first visited Iraan, in February. “But I am absolutely telling you the truth when I say that these boys were good kids. They made A’s and B’s in school. And until this thing happened in the bull pen, they had never given us one bit of trouble, not one. They probably hadn’t even been tardy to class.”

So why did four teenagers who could have been cast members on Friday Night Lights suddenly transform themselves, on a mild December night, into depraved characters straight out of Lord of the Flies? Was it possible that PETA was right—that the boys had revealed themselves to be genuinely dangerous criminals who would one day kill again? Was it possible that the boys, for some unfathomable reason, had lost their grip on reality?

Residents of Iraan (pronounced “Ira-ann”) like to say they live “two miles from nowhere,” and it’s hard to argue with them. The town sits at the edge of the Trans-Pecos region, one of the most remote places in the state. It is usually impossible to get a cell phone signal unless you stand in the high school parking lot and hold your phone toward the sky. If you want to buy nice clothes or see a movie, you have to drive to Midland, Odessa, or San Angelo.

Iraan is named, predictably enough, for Ira and Ann Yates, the owners of a ranch where a giant oil field was discovered in 1926. During those boom days, 1,600 people lived there, but because Iraan was almost completely surrounded by the Yates ranch, it was never able to get much bigger. Today it remains just 0.6 square miles in size. “It’s the kind of town where everyone knows everyone else,” said Allen, a soft-spoken 51-year-old Houston native who moved to West Texas seventeen years ago so that he could raise his children in a small community. “Everyone in Iraan even knows what kind of car or truck everyone else drives. It’s not exactly the kind of place where you can keep many secrets.”

Most of Iraan’s small businesses are scattered along U.S. 190, which cuts through the center of town. Besides the Old House, there are a couple of Mexican restaurants, a couple of convenience stores, a hardware shop, a motel, a hospital, an RV park, and a handful of oil-field supply companies. On the north side of town is the Alley Oop museum and park, which contains some dinosaur sculptures. (The park was named in honor of the nationally syndicated Alley Oop comic strip, created by a local newspaperman in the thirties.) On the south side of town is Iraan High.

Every morning, Principal Hernandez walks up and down the school’s lone, long hallway, checking on his 132 students. He cheerfully slaps them on the back while giving them a once-over, making sure they are adhering to the school’s strict dress code. (Boys must keep their hair off their ears; girls’ skirts must come no higher than just above the knees.) “Because we’re so small, we’re able to keep tabs on all our kids,” he said. “Seriously, before the morning bell rings, I already know who’s absent.”

Hernandez makes a point of pushing his students to participate in as many after-school activities as they can handle. At University Interscholastic League competitions, the school often shows up with a full contingent of debate teams, science and computer teams, musicians, and a one-act-play troupe. And then there’s football. Of the 65 boys at Iraan High, 41 played on the team last year. “That’s always the way it’s been here,” said head coach John Fellows, who has coached the sport in West Texas since 1998 and who moved to Iraan in 2005. “If you’re born a boy in Iraan, there’s a good chance you’re going to be on the football field, no matter how big you are.”

By all accounts, the four football stars were prototypical West Texas teenagers—none more so than Call, whose father is the president of the one-story TransPecos Bank, just a couple of blocks from the high school. Named for Woodrow Call, the hero of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, he learned to hunt and to cowboy at the family’s ranch outside town; he also grew to be an excellent golfer, playing weekends on Iraan’s dusty nine-hole public course. Zac, for his part, had a reputation around school for being the class jokester, “the kid who’s always laughing, always putting a smile on everybody’s face,” according to Hernandez. The principal described the lineman, who was also president of the student body in 2007, as “one of those kinds of kids everyone puts on a pedestal.” As for the all-state player, he was “about as easygoing and nonchalant as you can imagine, someone who never has a bad word to say about anyone.”

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