The driveway to hell....."Night was falling. Everything was out of control."

[Mask]

Just another person viewpoint of the story "Zanesville, Ohio zoo owner sets exotic animals free, kills himself"
All i could do while reading thru these pages, its horrible but amazing at the same time. Real kool story I guess.

Zanesville Zoo Animal Escape - Animals, by Chris Jones(full story)

page 1

A neighbor, a sixty-four-year-old retired schoolteacher named Sam Kopchak, first saw Thompson's horses sprinting around their hilly pasture, just on the other side of the wire fence that ran between their properties. Kopchak was on his way up the slope from the little white house he shares with his eighty-four-year-old mother, Dolores, to retrieve his own horse, a pinto named Red, from his small field out back. It was fifteen or twenty minutes before five o'clock, two hours before dark, and Kopchak wanted to bring Red into his barn for the night. He was a new horse owner, and Red was his only horse — that late Tuesday afternoon, October 18, 2011, marked only their ninth day of shared company — but he knew enough about horses to know that they don't normally run in circles, not by the dozens, around and around. There was a bad storm blowing in, but bad storms had blown into Zanesville before, and the horses had never torn after one another like that, kicking up the earth.

page 2

There, Red began to pace. Kopchak went into the barn and fetched a green plastic bucket that he filled with water, which he thought he might use to draw Red away from the commotion. In the middle of his long walk up, Kopchak saw a black shape that was different from the others, different from all those panicked horses. At first he saw just its humped back beyond the crest of a hill. But then he saw the rest of it, and now Kopchak knew what the horses knew. He saw what was unmistakably a bear, giving chase.

He knew that Thompson kept animals other than horses. Everybody in Zanesville did. The farm was a local legend, T's Wild Kingdom, an almost mythical place where, people swore, giraffes sometimes appeared in the fields, where camels had broken loose and darted onto I-70, running along the north side of Thompson's seventy-three-acre spread. Everybody knew that Thompson kept more dangerous animals, too: lions and mountain lions, grizzlies and black bears, leopards and tigers and wolves. Many had been purchased at auctions over the years.

Sam Kopchak, at the window of his small barn, where he took refuge and later listened to the gunfire of sheriff's deputies.

Kopchak kept his eyes on the bear, which continued to run through the fields. After he'd managed to corral Red, he would call Thompson, the way he had many times before, usually to come get his pit pony after it had pushed through the fence. The bear was an unusual sight, but it wasn't, by itself, of any particular concern to Kopchak. He had once seen Thompson driving down the road with a bear cub on his chest. Thompson had stopped, rolled down his window, and asked Kopchak if he'd like to pet the bear; when Kopchak blanched, Thompson was upset. "People don't understand animals," he said, and Kopchak was never certain whether Thompson was talking about him or about the world at large.

Now he approached Red, reaching out with his bucket of water, calling to him gently. Red nosed in for a drink, and Kopchak got a rope on him. He put down the bucket and began to lead his horse back toward the barn. He'd covered maybe twenty or thirty yards, Red bouncing a little, pulling at his rope, when Kopchak suddenly felt a shiver go over him. "I can't really explain it," he says today, "except to say that I felt like I was being watched." He looked back toward Thompson's band of horses; the bear was pushing them north, toward the highway. Then Kopchak saw the lion.

It was a male African lion, with a great golden mane. "It was just enormous," Kopchak says. The lion was to his left, feet rather than yards away, pressed against that thin wire fence. It was lying flat on the grass with only its giant head lifted up, and it had been watching Kopchak walking down the hill. The lion was looking dead at him. Kopchak let out a breath and fixed his eyes straight on his barn, still more than a hundred yards away. He made two decisions: He would not run, and he would not leave Red. He would walk, as calmly and as steadily as a sixty-four-year-old retired schoolteacher being watched by a lion could manage, all the way back down to his barn.

Kopchak looked back only once, and the lion returned his stare. It had also risen to its feet. The fence had seven strands of wire strung between its wooden posts; the lion's back ran parallel to the second strand from the top. Kopchak continued to walk down the hill. Each push into the mud felt slower than the last. Finally, he opened the barn's big sliding doors and stepped inside with Red in tow; he closed the doors with a clang and felt his shoulders slump a little. He put Red into his stall, and he reached into his pocket for his cell phone. Reception wasn't good. He stood in a corner of the barn closest to the house, and he called his mother. He told her that he was inside the barn, and that there was a bear and a lion outside the barn, and she needed to stay inside the house. She also needed to make a phone call.

page 3

Jay Lawhorne, a former Marine, helped lead the hunt.


Not long before six, Jay Lawhorne weaved through the roadblock that had been set up at the top of Kopchak Road and swerved into the bottom of the driveway. He was the last member of the SWAT team to arrive. He was carrying an M4 assault rifle across his front and an MP5 submachine gun on his back — the Marines had taught him the importance of a smooth transition between weapons — as well as his Glock on his leg. He had eight thirty-round magazines stuffed into the pockets of his cargo pants. He hoped it would be enough. Kanavel's Silverado was already idling where the pipe gate had been; the men in the back beckoned at Lawhorne to hurry up. Blake was behind the wheel, the windows rolled down so that he could hear directions. Kanavel, Tony Angelo — Lawhorne's old sniper friend — and Deputy Ryan Paisley stood in the bed. Lawhorne jumped up with them, slammed closed the gate, and then pushed a wad of tobacco behind his lip.

Lutz had given them unambiguous orders. They were going to be alone on the farm, those men in their truck, and they were to shoot every animal they saw. Three teams of deputies had been sent out to watch the farm's perimeter: One patrolled the southern exposure, on Fred Polk's farm; a second would watch the fence line along Kopchak Road; a third, including Merry, had been sent down to the shoulder of the eastbound lanes of I-70. The three patrols would act as firebreaks, preventing any animals that were flushed out from escaping, but the bulk of the load would fall on the men in that truck. "I think people were thinking we were hooping and hollering, like a bunch of rednecks," Kanavel says. "This was a police operation."

Page 3. The search for Thompson

John Moore, one of the volunteer caretakers, arrived at the farm. He was forty-eight years old, and he had worked at the farm for fifteen of those years. He knew the animals nearly as well as anyone. (Marian Thompson had heard from the police, but she was out of town and hours away; she'd called Moore and asked him to hurry over.) Moore met Sergeant Blake at the bottom of the driveway while shots rang out around them. Blake told Moore that a lot of the animals were out, but there was no sign of Thompson.

"Is there a white van up there?" Moore asked.

Yes, he had seen a white van.

"If a white van's up there, Terry's there," Moore said.

Blake put Moore in the backseat of his cruiser, and they drove together back to the pens. There were animals everywhere.

"Will you go in the house?" Blake asked.

Moore disappeared through the door.

Blake pulled out his shotgun, loaded with deer slugs from the cruiser's rack, and decided to search the yard. Behind the house, by the fetid swimming pool, he found a mountain lion, sitting in the fading sun. He kept his shotgun pointed at the cat, and, he recalls, they came to an understanding: I won't bother you if you won't bother me. Blake went around the mountain lion and the rest of the house before he arrived back at his car. He blew the horn, and Moore came out. He hadn't found Thompson.

Together they went back inside. A terrible stench filled Blake's nostrils. There were two bedrooms that were relatively tidy, but the rest of the house had been beaten back in time by the animals. The floors were covered in dirt. In the kitchen, two monkeys screamed and shook the bars of their cage. Three leopards — two spotted and one black — and a small bear were also still locked away, crashing around. When Blake began pushing open doors, his shotgun at the ready, he was suddenly filled with the fear that Thompson had booby-trapped his house with something other than animals: a dead man's line tied to a door knob, explosives wired to a light switch. The screaming of the monkeys followed him everywhere, breaking his concentration. "Those monkeys, raising hell," he says, shaking his head. "It was just unreal." Room by room he and Moore searched the rest of the house. They came up empty.

They returned to the car and Blake once again headed down the driveway. "Stop!" Moore shouted from the backseat, looking out the window to his right. "I think Terry's down there."

They got out of the cruiser, and they both saw Terry Thompson, down a short embankment, bloody and lying flat on his back. There was a pistol on the grass; Blake didn't see the blue bolt cutters that were lying about ten feet away. A tiger — a white tiger, a genetic mutant — was gnawing at Thompson's head. Most of the top of his head was missing; other parts of him had also been eaten. Now the white tiger dragged Thompson around, puncturing his throat with its teeth. There was a lot of blood. Behind his body, a small trash fire smoldered. Smoke rose into the darkening sky. "I'll always wonder what he didn't want us to find," Blake says. The tiger continued to feed.

page 4

Down on the shoulder of I-70, Deputy Merry looked through a thermal-imaging camera, scanning the blackness between the trees. It was closing in on eight o'clock. Not long before, he had been joined by some firefighters who had brought their trucks to try to light up the roadside woods; they had also brought the camera. In the fading light Merry and another deputy had already shot several animals that had made it off the farm: another wolf, two lions, a tiger. In that stretch along the highway, the fence was broken down, held together with fraying twine. In one spot it had been pushed within inches of the ground. Night fell across the gap like a curtain.

Now Merry saw a shape in the camera. At first, he couldn't tell what it was; it was just a large mass, red hot, coming down the slope, out through the trees. Whatever it was, it wasn't fast like a cat. It was lumbering. But it was big and it was relentless, inching closer, step by step. Eventually, Merry realized it was a bear — a huge bear, a grizzly. He and the other deputy took aim at the red target on their camera. They fired, and they watched the bear crash to the ground. They watched it through their camera for a long time after. It finally began turning orange, then yellow, on its way to disappearing altogether, as cold as the leaves

page 5

At around eleven o’clock that night, five young friends were playing poker in Cambridge, Ohio, about twenty-five miles east of Zanesville, when they heard about the events unfolding at the farm. They bundled into a Jeep Cherokee with vague ideas. They said later that they were hoping, perhaps, to take some photographs of that night's carnage, but they hadn't really thought things through. They were just drawn to the lights.

Not long after they had thrown down their cards, they pulled into the bottom of Terry Thompson's driveway and found a dead lion, bleeding from its mouth. Thinking that they might make a rug out of the lion or get it stuffed, they wrestled the carcass into the back of their Jeep. It took them several minutes. A news crew stumbled on the poker buddies and their prize, and they filmed the lion through the Jeep's open back. Its head was hanging out over the dropped gate.

Some distance up the driveway, Lawhorne and Swope saw the glare of lights; suspicious, they began to work their way down toward them. Before they made it to the bottom of First Hill, they saw the Jeep reverse out of the driveway and turn south down Kopchak Road. Lawhorne radioed the deputies who were out on patrol, and they stopped the Jeep just a few hundred yards away. The lion in the back was hard to miss.

The five friends, who were later charged with misdemeanor theft, were told to return their stolen lion to the farm. A deputy followed them in his cruiser, and he radioed Lawhorne and Swope, asking them to meet him at the bottom of the driveway. They lashed ropes around the lion and dragged it out of the Jeep, leaving a bloodstain in the back.

The deputies took breaks only to piss or to have a bite to eat. On those rare occasions, they pulled the mule alongside a cruiser, leaving a two-foot gap between the vehicles. Then Lawhorne and Swope would stand back-to-back in the gap, their rifles at the ready on their chests, each man pissing in the opposite direction. "Everything had to come at us straightforward," Lawhorne says.

Finally, the night began to lift. Somewhere in the world the sun was rising, but on that Wednesday morning in Zanesville, the sun was just another vague idea. The sky went from black to purple to gray. Lawhorne and Swope stood muddy and hunchbacked with their hands on their hips and took stock of their long night's work. They hadn't shot any other animals, but they had collected twenty-one of them, "in stacks," Lawhorne says. They also knew where several other bodies remained: Because the deputies had started with the carcasses closest to the road, many were still laid out within sight of their pile, the rain running off their hides. From that vantage point, Jack Hanna would remember later, it looked as though Noah's Ark had run aground and wrecked in central Ohio.

A log of the dead: Not the actual animals but the number and types killed, from top to bottom,
left to right: two gray wolves, two grizzly bears, one macaque monkey (presumed eaten),
eighteen tigers, one baboon (killed by cats), eight lionesses,
six black bears, nine male lions, and three mountain lions. All were buried in a mass grave on Thompson’s farm.

Lawhorne would helped drag the carcasses together to keep track of the dead.

 

[UptempoDro]

Just read every lick of that shit.. INSANE!

 

[Mask]

yea that shit was crazy

 

[LoneStar]

Wow, that was a amazing and horrifying incident.

Great read.

I can see a creative writer making this into a good horror movie.

 

[Lucky7s]

I wanna read..I swear I do...

 

[UptempoDro]

Wow, that was a amazing and horrifying incident.

Great read.

I can see a creative writer making this into a good horror movie.

Lol.. Shit could almost be a chapter of a video game.

 

[Mask]

Wow, that was a amazing and horrifying incident.

Great read.

I can see a creative writer making this into a good horror movie.

My exact thoughts while reading this shit.
I would be highly interested in the ending.

 

[jafield3]

damn

 

[soze]

I wanna read..I swear I do...

..I know right?..but shit its 7 in the morning..I'll be back

 

[SamSneed]

Jay Lawhorne, a former Marine, helped lead the hunt.

I hate this shit we never stop being Marines