Re-entry center foe says horses targeted

Deborah Rose doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that someone skulked around her property and tried to poison her horses.

An outspoken opponent of a Department of Correction plan to open a prison early release center in Kootenai County, Rose thinks someone who doesn’t agree with her views has singled her out.

“I have become a target for their threats and accusations,” Rose said.

Her horses were nearly poisoned, Rose said. She’s also received threats via email and on a Facebook page she operates called Say No To Prison Release Center in Kootenai County.

“I’ve had horses here for 18 years and I’ve never had any problems like this,” Rose said.

Results from a toxicology lab in California show that two piles of grain that were dumped in her barn in October were laced with mouse and rat poison.

Rose’s husband, Dave Botting, went out to check on the horses in a 1-acre pasture at 7 that night and found two piles of grain inside an open barn used by the horses to get out of the weather.

He said the horses, an Arabic named Charik and a quarter horse named Magic, found the grain at the same time as Botting and were eating it.

Botting pushed the horses away, and scooped up the grain.

“I don’t feed my horses grain,” Rose said.

She said the amount of grain — Botting scooped up almost 8 gallons worth — would have made the horses sick.

Botting likely went to check on the horses not long after the perpetrator dumped the grain.

A quick inspection of the grain showed it was mixed with large chunks and small pellets of green rodent poison.

Botting said that when he checked the dirt road that runs alongside the barn, he found tire tracks and footprints in the mud leading into the fenced enclosure.

It wasn’t the first time someone had been in with the horses, he said.

A week or two earlier, someone had left the gate open, allowing the horses to get loose.

Rose, a Kootenai County planning and zoning commissioner who is collecting signatures on a petition to sink the Correction plan, said the sheriff’s office is investigating the rat-poison incident and the earlier incident in which the gate to the hay barn was left open, allowing the horses to gorge themselves on the hay.

“Rose said she had no idea who could have been prowling on their property, but mentioned she has had trouble in the past with harassment and text threats because of ... political differences,” according to an Oct. 3 sheriff’s report.

Rose said she knows her neighbors along Seasons Road south of Athol — she has lived in the place for 20 years — and they know her horses.

None would attempt to harm them.

“They love them,” she said.

Rose said the incidents began after she started a lecture tour in August apprising people of her views of plans for the release center.

Rose and sheriff’s candidate Bob Norris had rallied several hundred people in small communities including Athol, Bayview and Rathdrum before the incidents occurred.

Rose has said that prison early release centers do not work and waste taxpayer dollars.

“Re-entry facilities are basically indisputable failures and an ineffectual use of taxpayer dollars and public resources,” Rose wrote in a recent My Turn column in the Coeur d’Alene Press.

The centers neither reduce recidivism nor help to establish long-term employment, she said.

“Let me stress, whether run publicly or privately, prisoner re-entry programs do not work,” she said.

Local legislators voted to approve the $12 million Correction appropriation in this year’s legislative session. Proponents say the center, which is supposed to be a transition center where inmates learn to adjust to society by getting jobs and counseling before being released, is a good fit for North Idaho’s urban center because many of the inmates are from here and the area has more jobs than employees.