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A judge sentenced Boyd H. Fenton to between 7 and 15 years in a state prison Friday for the arson death of 30 race horses.
The fire occurred at a Tioga Downs Casino complex in New York back in November. A cat also perished in the flames while a trainer attempting to save the animals sustained second degree burns.
The 33-year-old Fenton, of Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty back in January to charges of arson and 30 counts of interference with or injury to certain animals.
“That’s what you did. You murdered our kids,” horse owner Mindy Findling Repko said directly to Fenton in court, central New York’s WSYR reported.
As Fenton was escorted out of the courtroom, a woman in the audience said, “Enjoy your prison sentence, you low life,” WSYR reported.
Repko told local affiliate WENY that when her husband, Jan, told her the unfathomable news, it destroyed her.
“I just looked at him [Jan] and I’m like, ‘What are you saying? How could they just be gone,'” Repko told the station. “I made my way to the couch and that’s where I stayed for … I couldn’t even tell you how long.”
Repko told the station that the loss has profoundly and permanently hurt her.
“The second anxiety attack … he [Jan] said, ‘I’m taking you to the hospital,’ and I said, ‘No, you’re not,'” she told the outlet. “I said to him, ‘Jan, I don’t care. If I die, I will go and be with my boys.'”
“I don’t even know how he [Fenton] can fathom what it is that he has done to us,” Repko said.
Drugs were a factor in the crime as Fenton claimed to have simply stopped along the highway following a prolonged period of not sleeping and believed "people were chasing him".
- Nagesh Rath, Gambling911.com
