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

(Page 4 of 4)

The respected outdoor-sports columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, Mike Leggett, who does his share of hunting in West Texas, was so sickened by what the boys had done that he wrote, “Instead of letting these kids back on the football field next fall, let them spend Fridays patrolling highways around Iraan picking up dead animal carcasses. If they wade through enough skunks, coons, snakes and flattened deer while their buddies are wading through cheerleaders and pep squads, maybe they’ll take something from this other than a fine and an adjudicated sentence. . . . There can be no lesson learned and no lesson taught unless they pay a real price for what they’ve done.”

But in mid-March a committee of high school teachers and administrators, appointed by Hernandez, decided that the lesson had indeed been learned. The boys had been model students for 46 days, they concluded, and there was no reason for them to complete the rest of the semester in detention. A Midland psychologist who had been hired by the district to evaluate them noted that they had shown no “anger issues” or emotional disorders that might suggest they would commit further acts of violence. Davis was also satisfied that the boys had been punished enough. “Listen, I’ve been around a lot of hardened, calloused kids who I knew were going to cause trouble for years to come,” he told me. “These boys weren’t like that. They told us the truth about what they had done. And they seemed genuinely remorseful. They also didn’t have any prior criminal record, which to me was significant. In the end, I didn’t feel there was any need to load them down with a felony charge that they would be stuck with forever.”

Hernandez broke the news to the boys himself, informing them that they would be returning to their regular classes. “We’ve weathered this storm,” he told them, “and now we’re not going to give anyone any reason to talk. We’re going to prove ourselves over and over again.” The boys went out to get haircuts and showed up at the high school the next morning. Because all four had been banned from school grounds and all school activities (they had also been grounded by their parents since mid-December, forbidden from leaving their homes even on weekends), they had seen only a few of their fellow students. They were “a little apprehensive about how they would be treated,” noted Hernandez. But the response was overwhelming. Guys pounded them on the back. Girls hugged them. Teachers shook their hands. Call rejoined the golf team and went to the district meet, shooting a 76 to win top medalist honors. Zac and one of the minors rejoined the track team and helped lead it to the district championship. And by the time summer came around, residents all over Iraan began talking about the prospects of next year’s football team now that the four stars were back.

“It feels good to finally have it all behind us, to know people aren’t against us here in Iraan,” Zac told me. “I just wish everyone else outside Iraan would forget what happened and let us move on with our lives. It’s like all these people really think we should live with this one mistake for the rest of our lives.”

The Internet, of course, was rife with messages from those who said they would never forget. Bloggers who had previously attacked school officials for letting the boys stay in school were furious that they were getting to rejoin sports teams. “Wow, kids can get expelled for drugs, weapons, or fighting,” someone commented. “Kill and torture animals, and all is well in Iraan.” One writer proposed that any school competing with Iraan “file a complaint with the University Interscholastic League that Iraan is using criminals,” and another suggested that the football team’s motto, “Fear the Spear,” be changed to “Fear the Spear, Because We Kill Deer.” Plenty of commenters warned the citizens of Iraan to lock up their children at night (“I pity the poor townfolks there when [the boys] get REALLY bored!” one declared), while many more wished the boys endless pain and misery for the rest of their lives. Wrote one: “I hope that every night they have nightmares about being lured into batting cages.”

In reality, however, the venom soon began to fade. PETA moved on to other issues: neglected sheep in Ohio, the horrors of donkey basketball at an Illinois high school. And the fact was that the boys were certainly not doing anything to set off new complaints. They’d been “squeaky clean, pretty close to perfect in their behavior,” Hernandez informed me with a chuckle. “And all of them have told me they don’t want to have anything to do with any deer ever again—not hunting them, chasing them, anything. None of our kids do. The other day, a deer was in the outfield eating some grass, and when he tried to leap away, he miscalculated, ran right into the fence, and collapsed. Some of our athletes were out there, and they ran as fast as they could to the coaches’ offices, yelling, ‘We didn’t do it! We didn’t do it!’”

Things were going so well, in fact, that Call’s grandmother, Gaile, sent Texas Monthly a letter in June asking that the magazine not publish one more story about the boys. “Since school will be in the process of beginning a new year, give these young guys a chance,” she wrote. “Another chance. Don’t keep beating the dead horse.”

But in her letter, she was unable to explain why her grandson and the others had so viciously clubbed the deer, except to write, “We all understand that messing up is part of growing up.” The truth was that plenty of people, even those who supported the boys, remained baffled by what had happened. “How do you explain why four good kids suddenly decide to do a bad thing?” Allen told me, leaning back in his chair and staring out the window of his office, which, coincidentally enough, provided him a slight view of the high school’s baseball field. “How can anyone explain it?”

When I asked Hernandez, who had made a point of spending time with the four boys almost every day of the week during their disciplinary period, if they had ever given him any insight into the killings, he paused, then finally said, “I have to admit, I brought that subject up a dozen times, and they couldn’t explain it. They’d keep saying that one thing led to another, and just like that, it was all over. I’d go, ‘But why?’ And there would be this silence. They still didn’t have an answer.”

Perhaps they will never have that answer. During my conversation with Zac, I trotted out numerous theories about what had motivated their actions that night. At one point, I asked if he and his friends were wanting to blow off some steam because their football season had just ended and they hadn’t won the big game. “It was your first free Friday night since September,” I suggested, “and maybe you and your buddies had had a few beers and got a little rowdy.”

“No, we didn’t do anything like that,” Zac said. He glanced quickly at his father, sitting next to him, and then he added, “When we got the deer in the bull pen, they started running into the fence, getting hurt, and we decided to put them out of their misery.”

I stared at him. Neither he nor Call had made any reference to a mercy killing when they’d written out their confessions for the game wardens back in December. According to Davis, the two had never once hinted during his long interview with them that the deer had been in distress before the beatings.

“Is that really what happened?” I asked him.

“Yes, sir,” he said, swallowing, and I couldn’t help but think of the scene at the end of Lord of the Flies, when one of the main characters, Ralph, tries to come to terms with the devastation he and the other boys have inexplicably wreaked on the island—wrestling with what William Golding described as “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.” I wondered if the reason Zac had created this new explanation, trying to put a good spin on the deer’s deaths, was because he, like Ralph, was genuinely haunted by what he had done.

I left Iraan late that afternoon, as the sun was setting. Allen’s secretary told me to drive carefully. “You’ll see deer crossing the highway,” she said, “and if you think you’re going to run into one, don’t swerve and try to miss it. You could run off the road and have a bad accident. Just hit the deer straight on. That’s the safest thing.”

She smiled at me. “You think I’m kidding, don’t you?”

She was not. Before I was thirty miles outside of town, I had seen a dozen deer, all of them cutting through the brush, their eyes gleaming in my headlights. One, a mature doe, looked poised to cross the highway. I slowed down, and for a moment, she stared in my direction. Then she suddenly turned and raced away.

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