By Jason Meisner, February 2016
On a summer morning nearly three years ago, residents of downstate Morris awoke to a peculiar sight. Minks were everywhere. Running through yards, darting under parked cars, scurrying across farm roads on the way into town. Dozens of the animals lay dead in the road, killed by traffic. Others splashed in lawn sprinklers to escape the heat.
In the middle of the night, two California animal rights activists had broken into a local mink farm wearing balaclavas and armed with bolt cutters and released more than 2,000 of the furry creatures, federal prosecutors say. The owners found cages emptied and their business ruined. Spray-painted on the side of their barn were the words "LIBERATION IS LOVE."
In federal court Monday, one of the activists, Kevin Johnson, was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution to the victims of the sabotage.
In handing down the sentence, U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve said she was troubled by the "escalation" of Johnson's activism over the years and that previous stints behind bars have not seemed to deter him. She also noted that his actions on the mink farm that night caused suffering for many of the animals he professed to want to save. In all, more than 550 of the minks died, many painfully, the judge said.
Johnson, 29, pleaded guilty last year to one count of conspiring to travel across state lines to interfere with the operations of an animal enterprise. Before he was sentenced, Johnson choked back tears as he apologized for the attack, saying he has finally realized after nearly a decade of arrests that committing criminal acts was not an acceptable form of protest.
"I'm tired of it. I don't want it for my life," Johnson said, leaning forward into the microphone as the farm's owners looked on from the courtroom gallery. "I see these old guys in jail, all their best days are behind them and they're still going back. I'm not going to be that guy."
With time already served, Johnson could be released in as little as three months, according to his lawyer, Michael Deutsch. When he is released, Johnson will spend up to a year at an inpatient center near his home in California, where he will get treatment for mental health issues and receive job placement assistance, Deutsch said.
Johnson and his longtime friend, Tyler Lang, were in the midst of a cross-country journey to sabotage animal farms when they were arrested in August 2013. According to Johnson's plea agreement with prosecutors, after he and Lang freed the minks from the Morris farm, they poured caustic substances over two farm vehicles, causing significant damage, and destroyed cards from the minks' cages that identified their breed and are required for their sale.
When police stopped them two days later, they were just a few miles from a fox farm in Woodford County that they planned to sabotage as well, authorities said. Among the items seized from Johnson's vehicle were five bottles of muriatic acid, two bottles of bleach and a container of hydrogen peroxide, all ingredients for a homemade incendiary device.
Also found were books titled "Thinking Like a Terrorist" and "Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques," prosecutors said.
Lang, 27, has pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
The owner of the farm, Robert Rodeghero, told the judge during the hearing that he'd started raising minks as a hobby in 1979 and eventually built a business he hoped would supplement his factory worker's pension. After the attack, Rodeghero and his employees were able to corral about 1,600 of the freed minks, but the damage to the skittish and "high-strung" animals was done, he said. About 150 died in their cages in the days after their recapture.
He and his wife also suffered psychologically, Rodeghero said. For two weeks after the incident, he slept outside by the minks' cages with a loaded gun at the ready.
In asking for at least three years in prison, prosecutors said that while Johnson's ideas about animal rights "are noble," the tactics he has chosen have become increasingly violent and undermine law-abiding activists who try to make change through legal protest.
"(Johnson) has stalked, stolen, harassed, and threatened to make his point," Assistant U.S. Attorney Bethany Biesenthal wrote in a court filing. "... His past shows an escalating dangerousness."
Records show Johnson has a long criminal record in California. He first came to the attention of law enforcement during a protest against juice company executives in Santa Monica in 2006. Video from the protests showed Johnson screaming on a bullhorn outside the executives' homes, threatening to harm them and their families, according to prosecutors. He was convicted of burglary and served time in prison.
Three years later, Johnson was arrested after threatening some UCLA professors over their use of animals in research. He later pleaded guilty to criminal stalking and served about 1 1/2 years in prison, prosecutors said.
In May 2012, five months after his release on parole, Johnson was arrested for shoplifting and inciting a riot, prosecutors said. Later that year he was arrested for attempting to burglarize a pharmacy, and when authorities searched a laptop computer found in Johnson's car, they found personal information on scientific researchers and their families, according to prosecutors.
His mother, Tracy Rich, told the judge her son is highly intelligent and loving but has long battled depression and mental illness.
(originally posted by Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-animal-activist-mink-sentencing-met-20160229-story.html)
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