The mother raccoon must have thought it was a good place to raise a litter.   Turns out, it was the fire chamber of a tar machine. When roofers lit it to repair a roof at Northside Hospital, the singed mother and a baby ran out. Another was stuck inside, crying.

The crew called a supervisor, who decided the animal couldn't be saved and started the heater again. The raccoon burned to death. And Eric L. Hill, 49, went to jail. He was arrested on a charge of animal cruelty, a third-degree felony that carries up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

"How do you express yourself at the feeling of loss and outrage that you have in a situation like this?" said Gary Morse, spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the agency that made the arrest. "I don't know how to express that."

Hill, of 3738 67th Ave. N in Pinellas Park, was released from jail on $5,000 bail. He said he was shocked at the charge. He thought firing the kettle again was better than letting the injured animal suffer.

"What I thought would be the humane thing to do was just turn the burner on as high as I could go and get the animal out of its misery," he said.

Vernon Yates, who runs Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation in Seminole, said raccoons are notorious for giving birth in strange places — the attics of houses, covered boats and cellars. Hill said the tar kettle hadn't been used for a while.

  (Photo courtesy of the St. Petersburg Times)  Veterinarian Don Woodman holds a baby male raccoon after treating it at the Animal Hospital of Northwood in Safe Harbor.

Yates took in the lone surviving baby, which is about 3 weeks old and fits in the palm of a hand. After a visit to the veterinarian, Yates said it's too early to tell if it will recover. He said the raccoon lost some fur and smells like singed hair. He's thinking of naming it Lucky or Miracle.

"It'll be a miracle if he lives, really," Yates said. "You figure the heat that comes through this thing has got to be like a crematory."

Update 1/1/09:  Eric Hill was a roofing supervisor called to a site after the workers fired up a tar heater and a family of singed raccoons ran out. He heard a baby raccoon crying inside. He figured the stuck animal would suffer longer if he tried to take the machine apart to rescue it. So he fired it up again, burning the raccoon to death.

There's no explicit exception for "mercy killings" in the cruelty statute, but Dietz said it's inherent in the definition. She suggested that Hill could try to prove that his decision saved the raccoon from suffering.

But his attorney, Jim Beach, worked out a plea deal with prosecutors recently in which Hill will get community service and a fine. Beach wanted to avoid a jury trial because he was afraid people's passions would take hold. "People were calling the state attorney to get his hide," Beach said.

Reference:

St. Petersburg Times

The Ledger