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.
Genevieve says: It’s going to take a long time before people forget this incident. It’s sickening. I understand deer are a tremendous pest but as an avid hunter I cannot possibly tolerate beating an animal to death. It’s wrong, it’s immoral and it’s incredibly cruel. I’m from a small town and we didn’t consider clubbing animals to death sport. It was premeditated, it was wrong. What goes around, comes around.... (March 4th, 2010 at 10:22am)
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Zac was the only one of the four who would speak to me, which he did in the presence of his father—the Braves’ defensive coordinator—and superintendent Allen. Wearing a blue T-shirt and a chain with a little cross around his neck, he sat at a conference table in Allen’s office and nervously ran a hand through his curly black hair (which was cut well above his ears). I started off the conversation by asking what teenagers in Iraan do for fun. He shrugged. “We go to the Old House to eat, then ride around, talk to our friends, things like that. You know, it’s a small town. There’s nothing really to do here except hang out. You can get bored pretty easily.”
Zac admitted that, to entertain themselves, he and his fellow football stars, along with a few other friends from the team, had chased deer in the baseball field on another night earlier that fall. “We were doing the loop, and when we drove by the baseball field, we saw the deer. We chased them around the outfield until they jumped back over the fence.” Then he said something revealing. “It didn’t seem that big of a deal—something to do, I guess. They were just deer.”
There is no question that the town’s residents have a different attitude toward deer than city dwellers do. In Iraan, deer are everywhere. Residents constantly complain about their slipping into town at night and devouring their flowers and gardens. Farmers and ranchers complain about their going after crops. “I know people are going to take this wrong, but out here, a deer isn’t Bambi,” the mother of one of the players told me. “Our deer are a nuisance. And they can be very dangerous. Every couple of weeks, you hear a story of someone wrecking their car because they collided with a deer. If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is drive down a highway around here and look at all the dead deer on the side of the road.”
What’s more, just about every male in Iraan has gone deer hunting. “When my son was in the fourth grade,” said the mother, “his dad took him hunting, and he shot his first deer, a small one. We had a taxidermist mount the deer’s head on a plaque, and underneath the plaque we had a humorous inscription typed up: ‘Deer Tremble in His Presence.’” She sighed. “Well, it was humorous at the time.”
When I asked how she and her husband had reacted when they’d learned that their son was one of the deer killers—according to the game warden’s report, he had wielded the spear—she replied, “Not very well, believe you me. I took my son out of class, took him home, and kept saying, ‘What were you thinking? What were you thinking?’ And all he could say was, ‘Mom, we weren’t thinking.’ And I believed him. Listen, I know my son. He’s not violent in any way. None of those boys are. They did a stupid teenage thing, and they’ve learned their lesson.”
The mother added that the boys have learned another lesson about those who live outside small-town Texas. “I had to sit down with my son and explain to him that people in places like New York City don’t understand us. That’s what this is all about, you know. The ones who are most upset are people who only see brown-eyed deer in movies. If the boys had killed some rats, no one would have said a word.”
In the aftermath of the boys’ crime, numerous West Texans would make similar points. “You city folks should not even comment because you don’t know anything about growing up in a small town,” one Iraan resident posted on the Odessa American’s Web site. “Go Braves.” Another chimed in, “You animal huggers need some common sense. Deer are a pest. They are not a domesticated animal like a dog, so saying that these boys should be treated the same as Michael Vick is a little outlandish.” “All of you city people think that deer are such precious little animals that eat only a little bit,” a farmer wrote to the San Angelo Standard-Times. “Well, try losing $80,000 in income during the 2006 fiscal year you morons.” What also dumbfounded West Texans was that the animal rights activists seemed to care more about the dead deer than about violent crime against human beings. “Why aren’t you people who are so concerned about what those 2 deer suffered commenting about the atrocity of a parent beating a child to death?” wrote one woman, referring to a recent murder case in the Midland-Odessa area. “They were deer, and these are just kids,” someone else summarized. “Do we really need to read anymore into this?”
At one point, Call’s father, Jim Cade, became so enraged by all the Internet chatter describing his son as a future serial killer (as well as online rumors suggesting that he had bribed law enforcement officials to keep his boy out of jail) that he hired a Washington, D.C., law firm that specializes in Internet law to try to find out the identities of the anonymous bloggers and perhaps sue them for defamation. Jim himself was once a West Texas football star—he played cornerback for the Sonora Broncos during their 1970 state championship season—and he is clearly a huge fan of the Iraan High team: One of his business ads, which runs in the Iraan News, reads, “TransPecos Banks: Proud to be Home of the Braves.” During one of my visits to Iraan, I dropped by his office. Wiry and muscular, built like a bull rider, he was wearing a crisp shirt with pearl-snap buttons, blue jeans, and tie-up ropers. Although he was not at all happy to see me—he let me know immediately that he was not going to talk about his son (whose photo in full football uniform was prominently displayed on a shelf) or the deer beatings—he gave me a firm handshake, pointed toward a chair, and asked what kind of story I planned to write. When I said that I was going to mention how the killings had set off a national furor, he just shook his head, disgusted.
“I grew up on black and white television,” he said. “Gossip was conducted over the back fence. Now people can say anything they want, put it on the Internet, and it goes around the world, no matter how big of a lie it is. It’s just not right, what people have done to us.”
Actually, not all the criticism came from outside West Texas. There were a few people in Iraan who were horrified by the boys’ violent outburst. “Listen, I’ve been around the block,” said one longtime resident, Gwendolyn Parker Scallorn, a feisty, plainspoken woman whose late husband was the superintendent of the natural gas plant in town. “I know boys will be boys. But this made me sick to my stomach. It felt like murder. Some people felt that if these boys didn’t get into counseling and find out why they did such a thing, then we would be reading about them again someday in the newspaper—and it wouldn’t be pretty.”
A few veteran deer hunters in the area were especially disturbed that the boys had wanted to club the animals to death—and had then left them on the ground to rot. Although West Texas hunters are not exactly the kind of men one would describe as sensitive to a deer’s emotional state—a common boast is to have “dropped the hammer” on a beautiful buck—they do take great pride in what they call a “clean kill,” bringing down a deer with one perfectly placed shot just behind the shoulder blades. A hunter’s code also requires retrieving the carcass, for processing the venison and later consuming it. But as one self-described outdoorsman commented on a Midland television station’s Web site, when the four boys went out to kill deer, they obviously “weren’t looking for a trophy, they got a thrill from torturing animals—which leads me and plenty of other reasonable-minded people to believe that they have sadistic and abusive elements to their personalities.”
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