Pet Killings Traumatize Valley Family Two Pet Rabbits Killed, Skinned With Pelts Left Under Children’s Swing Set

Heather Gwynn, 9, is afraid to look into her back yard at night.

She’s scared the person who slaughtered her pet rabbit is lurking in the darkness.

She and her brother, Ivan, 6, cared for two Siamese Satin rabbits for two years in the back yard of their Spokane Valley home.

Both animals were butchered during the past month, their hides left beneath the wooden swing set the children’s father made for them.

Sheriff’s deputies have no suspects, and the children’s parents can’t imagine who’s responsible.

Ivan, a first-grader at Trentwood Elementary, has had trouble sleeping and doesn’t want to go to school, said his mother, Barbara Gwynn.

Rolling around the living room with one of the family’s two cats, the blond boy grew somber and wiped tears from his freckled face when the rabbits were mentioned.

“The cruelest part of all was we found no blood on the lawn,” Barbara Gwynn said. “They took it somewhere else to (kill) it, then they brought the hide back and left it under the swing set for the kids to find.”

About 3 p.m. on Jan. 6, Barbara Gwynn picked her children up from school and brought them home. They live in a quiet residential neighborhood on East Wabash Court. Their back yard is mostly shut off from view by bushes and a fence.

About 3:20 p.m., Ivan went to feed the rabbits. He came back and said they were gone. At first, Barbara Gwynn wasn’t worried because the fat, fluffy rabbits sometimes got loose and scurried down the street, through lawns and back yards. They were somewhat of a running joke in the neighborhood, she said.

But that Friday afternoon, no one laughed when the pelt of Heather’s rabbit was found underneath the swing set about 30 feet away. “It was pulled like a sock, inside out,” Barbara Gwynn said.

The rabbit, named Nokomis after a lake in Barbara Gwynn’s native Minneapolis, was stripped of its flesh and entrails.

The other rabbit was found unharmed in a neighbor’s yard about three houses away.

During the next two weeks, the children gradually recovered from the rabbit’s death, their mother said. At first they kept the surviving rabbit, Calhoun, in the garage to protect it.

The family finally decided to put Calhoun back outside because the rabbit seemed happier there. They padlocked the cage, wrapped extra wire around it and put it back in the yard.

On Sunday morning, Barbara Gwynn’s husband, Cary, found the second rabbit’s pelt in the yard, under the swing set.

Some of the entrails were found in the garden.

Someone had dragged the cage across the yard and battered it open, Barbara Gwynn said. The rabbit’s pelt was cleanly cut off with what she thinks was a hunting knife.

“To have it happen a second time … we’re more angry and we’re more hurt,” Barbara Gwynn said.

She thought the first rabbit might have been killed for its meat. But when the second hide also was left under the swing set where her children would find it, she was convinced it was malicious.

“It’s hard to get through,” she said. “It was so heart-wrenching.”

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