Details emerge about theft, death of Minnesota school’s goat
Just days after Great River School’s beloved pet goat was found dead, over $6,300 has been raised to help protect the St. Paul, Minnesota charter school’s remaining animals from “human predation.”
A fundraising page is providing new and disturbing details about the animal’s theft and death.
Hazelnut, a 2-year-old, 120-pound Oberhasli goat, was last seen by school officials Tuesday night when video showed people around her pen. After pleas to the community to help find the goat, her remains were found Friday in a plastic tub in an alley on the 300 block of Lafond Avenue in St. Paul.
Money raised in a GoFundMe campaign will help safeguard goat and chicken pens and eventually allow the school to buy another goat, wrote Lisa Holt, the fundraiser’s organizer and leader of the goat and chicken program at Great River School.
“When our hearts and space are ready, we need to find another goat as much like Hazelnut as possible, and she was one in a million,” Holt said, noting that the “low-funded public charter school receives “87% of each dollar that traditional public school receives.”
Holt said the episode has students, teachers and parents reeling.
“As a community, we are heartbroken, horrified, and grieving,” she wrote.
Holt wrote on the GoFundMe site that security footage provided indications of how Hazelnut was stolen.
On Monday night, she wrote, a dark-colored SUV followed by a second car with at least two people inside were parked near the goat pen for 33 minutes. The next morning, when it was time to feed Hazelnut, school officials realized she was gone. The fence surrounding her pen had been broken and someone had lifted the 120-pound goat over a retaining wall that was several feet high, Holt said.
Hazelnut was last seen alive at 3:45 p.m. Wednesday “being carried across the shoulders of a man over a guardrail down to a nearby wooded train track, her head up and looking around. Tragically, this final sighting was by a distant neighbor who, at the time, had no idea that the goat was stolen or had any connection to our school, and the information came too late to stop what happened next,” Holt wrote.
Learning more details of what happened to Hazelnut is heart-wrenching, said Kristin Wells, a parent of a student at the school.
“It is so incredibly sad. I just hate to think of her being ‘carried across train tracks with her head up looking around,’ ” Wells said in an email Sunday. “That one really stabbed me through the heart. The only way I can make ANY sense if it IS maybe somebody was just very hungry.”
The animal program is a big deal at the charter school, Holt said.
“At Great River, we help connect students not only to academics, but to themselves, to one another, to the earth and to the wider community. We run a micro-farm onsite on our small urban campus, with goats, chickens, one duck, and a garden that our students help tend as part of their education,” she wrote. “Our animals are core to our sense of identity at our school, and they are absolutely beloved by our students and community. Hazelnut and our other two goats, Magnolia and Midnight, were visited and cared for by a stream of students, staff and community members each and every day. One could easily say they are the soul of our school.”
Hazelnut was chosen for the school because she was very social, extremely friendly and trusting of people.
“This goat LOVED people. She would hike for miles alongside you, knew her name and would come when she was called (if she hadn’t already come right up to you, which she had), and would even jump into a car on voice command. These are rare and precious things in a goat, and she was exactly what our school needed,” Holt wrote.
Police and animal control investigations are ongoing.