Animal group takes credit for attack
Sheriff Bergin: 'There is nothing lower than people who perform selfish acts'
By BEN SCHORZMAN
The Daily Astorian
July 29, 2010
SVENSEN - The Animal Liberation Front has taken responsibility for the attack at the former Ylipelto Mink Farm in Svensen.
In an anonymous Internet post on the North American Animal Liberation Press Office's website, the group said it snuck onto the property of Eeva Ylipelto on the morning of July 26 and exploded eight molotov cocktails. In all, the bombs destroyed a boat, a car, two forklifts and a front-end loader. A barn was also fire damaged, but the Knappa-Svensen Fire Department was able to put out the flames before the building burned down.
The Internet post condemns the Ylipeltos' operations and a headline above it claims, the farm was "destroyed." However, Henry Pelto, the son of Eeva Ylipelto, who lives on the property with his wife, Sheri, said that there haven't been mink on the property since December. In a KATU news broadcast Tuesday, Pelto showed a camera crew around the property and pointed out the area where the cages used to stand, but have since been taken down.
"They did not do their homework," Clatsop County Sheriff Thomas Bergin said. "It's a defunct farm."
Bergin blasted the people responsible for the attack, calling them "cowards" and said they have no respect for the property of others.
"We often see these types of individuals who have never worked or tried to better their own lives through hard work or make something for themselves, but they will take up some cause while sitting around their friend's or parent's house smoking pot thinking in their distorted little minds how they are going to make the world a better place," said Bergin in an e-mail.
"There is nothing lower than people who perform selfish acts that have the potential to take property - or worse yet - the life of another. Now if they lit themselves on fire to enhance their cause, at least I would have a little respect for them but once again, they are truly cowards living in a fantasy world."
"Why they did it, I don't know," Pelto said Tuesday.
The farm has been the target of two previous attacks. The earliest was in October 2008 when an activist for the Vegan Straight Edge Community released approximately 1,500 minks from their cages. As many as 1,200 were recovered. A year later, in October 2009, 300 more minks were released.
Bergin said investigators have gone thoroughly over the Ylipelto property and will continue to do so. He said they will take the clues they have to the crime lab and keep looking for the suspects. He did say, unlike the previous attacks, the activists changed the way they operated.
"We're going to continue to try and figure out who did this and go down that road," Bergin said.
Clatsop County Fire Investigation Team, the Oregon State Fire Marshal's Office, Oregon State Police, agents from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Sheriff's Office and the FBI are continuing the investigation.
