Man arrested after 5 dehydrated pit bulls seized
A 30-year-old Mount Dora man was arrested on a warrant Thursday after authorities found five dehydrated and flea-infested pit bulls in kennels at his home two months ago, according to an arrest report.
Donald Levon Barnes faces five counts of cruelty to animals in connection with the discovery of the dogs Oct. 31.
Responding to an anonymous complaint, Lake County Animal Control officers found two kennels with three pit bulls at the residence at 1925 Highland Park Blvd., according to the report.
“Two female pit bulls were covered with fleas housed in a kennel so small they could not move, resulting
golf course is one of the reasons why this burial ground has been preserved as well as it has for so long,” said Jay Revell, the country club’s resident historian and the vice president of the region’s chamber of commerce.
“A hundred years ago when the golf course was constructed, there was certainly no technology to decipher what was or wasn’t here,” he said during a recent visit to the country club.
There had long been talk among some Tallahassee old-timers about the longgone plantation and its cemetery.
The stories piqued Hollinger’s curiosity. He dug into newspaper archives, where he found clippings dating back to the 1970s that mentioned the burial site.
He contacted city officials for help, who in turn reached out to experts, including the National Park Service.
That’s when
Jeffrey in one dog sitting on top of the other dog, dehydrated with no food or water,” the report said. “The second kennel housed one dehydrated pit bull covered in fleas resulting [in] large amounts of flea debris.” Two more flea-infested pit bulls in makeshift kennels were found in the
Shanks, a park service archaeologist, took up the cause.
Earlier this month, after weeks of scanning 7,000 square meters of the golf course using ground-penetrating radar and two cadaver-sniffing dogs, Shanks issued his preliminary conclusion: The subsurface anomalies at the country club are indeed graves.
Shanks called the discovery a significant historical find because so many slave cemeteries are unaccounted for. backyard — one with an “abnormal bloated stomach” and the other “emaciated with his ribs and hip bones showing,” the report said.
The landlord and neighbors told officers the dogs had been in “deplorable condition” for three weeks and that the landlord advised the tenant to “clean up the property and provide adequate food, water and shelter for the animals,” the report said.
The dogs, ranging in age
“It’s a really serious problem,” Shanks said. “It’s not just a Florida problem. It’s really a problem across the Southeast.”
It’s hardly a new issue. A Florida state task force two decades ago estimated that there could be as many as 1,500 unmarked and abandoned slave or African American cemeteries across the state. Some Florida lawmakers want to establish a new task force to address the matter.
“We want to identify covered-up graves that have been built upon, or destroyed from 8 months to 7 years old, were taken to the Lake County animal shelter, where they were given intravenous fluids for dehydration and treatments for flea infestations, ear infections and hair-loss sores, the report said.
Barnes was released from the Lake County Jail after posting $5,000 bond. or obliterated from history,” said state Sen. Darryl Rouson, whose district lies in the Tampa Bay area. “Once identified, we’d like to do some type of memorial for those souls.”
Nationally, there have been discussions about establishing an African American Burial Grounds Network. Work is also underway on a national database to record the burial sites for enslaved Americans.
As property, slaves weren’t accorded dignity in life nor in death, said Jonathan Lammers, a historian who drafted a report on the Houstoun property.
“They were nameless on census records, and they are nameless and unremembered in death,” he said.
In Leon County, there are only a handful of known slave burial sites — despite the scores of plantations that once existed in the area. Each would have had a cemetery for its enslaved.
“It’s safe to say that there are thousands upon thousands of these graves in Leon County,“Lammers said, “and hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, across the Southeast that remain unknown today.”
At the Capital City Country Club, there are no plans to exhume or disturb any of the rediscovered remains. But how the site will be memorialized is still up for discussion.
Hollinger, for one, wants to reroute golf carts and fence off the area so golfers won’t tread over the graves. He also proposes a small memorial that will recount, he said, the unvarnished history of the property — including how it profited from the labor of slaves.
He doesn’t want the history of these graves “to be prettied up” or romanticized. “I want us to be accurate and truthful in the story we tell.”