Michigan town demands justice after cops shoot dead deer

Residents of a Michigan town are demanding justice for their deer friend Annie, who was shot dead by a tribal police officer earlier this month.

A graphic video posted online showed Pokagon Band Tribal Police Officer David Loza slipping a leash around Annie’s neck on a property in Lawrence on Oct. 20.

The deer could be seen jumping up and down trying to get the restraint off her, as people off-screen could be heard pleading with the officer to stop.

“That deer’s nice!” a man could be heard yelling. “That deer’s never hurt nobody.”

After a few moments, a second video shows Loza managed to pin the deer down.

He then pulled out a handgun and fired a single shot, sending the deer jolting before it went limp.

Speaking of the incident, Pamela Babb said officers were called to her property on an unrelated child support incident when Loza spotted the animal she and her family had cared for since she was just a fawn.

“He reached out and put his hand on her head, and he said, ‘She is domesticated and needs to be put down,” Babb recounted to WWMT.

The woman was charged with unlawfully domesticating a wild animal and is awaiting a date for her first court appearance.

Babb’s granddaughter, Nevaeh Sylvester, cried as she told how she could not save Annie, whom she fed three times a day growing up.

“I just wanted to so bad, but there was nothing we could have done,” she said between tears. “I just wanted her to be safe, and she wasn’t.”

“She was a piece of my family like a child or sibling, I was very close with her,” Sylvester said.

Babb’s family first rescued Annie as a fawn, when her mother was hit by a car. She said they contacted a local wildlife rescue facility to get her help, but “they couldn’t help us take her because they didn’t have any more room.”

So the family decided to take care of the young animal themselves.

“I felt that was the more humane thing to do as opposed to leaving her with her dead mother,” Babb said.

“When she got old enough, she just kept coming back to the farm, she would play with you, the kids.”

Over the years, Annie became a staple of the rural community — about 30 miles west of Kalamazoo.

“The whole town enjoyed her, she was everyone’s deer,” Babb said.

“Some people might think it was just a deer, it was part of nature, part of life. But to us, Annie meant more than that,” community member Robyn Gardner added to Fox 17.

She and other members of the community are now calling for justice in her killing, accusing Loza of acting inhumanely to the domesticated creature.

They created a Facebook group to share memories and express their outrage at Annie’s death, and some even spray painted “Justice for Annie” on their cars.

“First thing this morning, I woke up with her on my mind, wondering how she must have felt, how scared she must have been,” Gardner said.

“She trusted in humans. For a human to do that to her, I just feel very saddened wondering how she must have felt.”

Neighbor Shelbi Rindfield also accused Loza of taking “advantage of her trusting.”

Outraged by the incident, she reached out to the officer directly on social media.

“Shooting Annie could be the dumbest decision of your conservation officer career,” she wrote in a message obtained by Michigan Live.

“Annie was beloved by a lot of people here in the community. She regularly visits everyone and makes the rounds,” she said.

“He took something from Lawrence Township that is irreplaceable.”

Rindfield, now a student at Southwestern Michigan College, suggested Loza could have been more humane if officers decided Annie really had to be euthanized.

In a statement, Chief of Pokagon Band Tribal Police Mario RedLegs said the department is “currently conducting an investigation regarding a deer being euthanized at the property of a suspect from Lawrence, Michigan, who was taken into custody for a warrant on Friday, Oct. 20.

“The Pokagon Band Tribal Police were assisting Van Buren County law enforcement and consulted with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources,” he explained, noting that “the officer involved has been placed on administrative leave.

“We appreciate your patience in this matter, and we will provide an update once the investigation is complete.”

Meanwhile, Loza’s sister, Gretchen, shared a post on Facebook saying Annie’s death was not what it seemed.

“On behalf of our family, we wanted to say thank you for the hundreds of calls and texts,” she wrote on Tuesday. 

“Many of you have asked what we need, so here it is… we need those that are brave enough to stand by and STAND UP for Dave.

“Don’t judge a book by one paragraph, because in this case, people are missing a lot of the story,” she added.