Animal body parts found outside Hillsborough jail

Early this morning, cloaked in darkness, someone left a cardboard box in a marshy area in front of Falkenburg Road Jail.

About 5 a.m., a deputy on his way to work discovered the white box outside the jail's public entrance. When deputies looked inside, they saw something gruesome: two dead roosters, two dead baby chickens, a dead dove and a dead white goat.

The six animals were headless.

There was no note and there is no suspect, deputies said. But Hillsborough County Sheriff's Maj. Kenny Davis believes the culprit probably was a Santeria practitioner.

"Probably somebody putting a spell on somebody," Davis said.

Davis said similar packages – though perhaps not containing so many dead animals – occasionally are left by the jail.

"It's not alarming to us," he said. "It's kind of like, 'OK, here we go again.' "

Sheriff's spokesman Larry McKinnon said the box of headless animals might "have religious connotations in it for somebody inside the jail."

The case will be investigated as possible animal cruelty investigation, but there are some exemptions when animals are sacrificed for religious purposes, McKinnon said.

Another incident involving an animal's body part occurred in downtown Tampa last week.

On June 28, a deputy spotted a box with nails stick out of it in a parking lot at 800 E. Zack St., across from the county courthouses.

The Tampa police bomb squad was called to investigate the suspicious package. It contained a cow tongue with about 100 nails in it, said police spokeswoman Laura McElroy. There was no note.

Police and deputies are working together "to see if there's any connection with the two boxes with unusual contents," McElroy said.

Philadelphia Inquirer mob writer George Anastasia, who has written books about organized crime, said in underworld circles a mutilated tongue is a warning to someone not to talk or to stop talking.

But Anastasia questioned how someone would get that message from a box left in a parking lot outside courthouses.

"You would assume it's about don't talk, but it could be about some bizarre religious thing," he said.

University of South Florida religion professor Mozella Mitchell said no legitimate African derived religion in the Caribbean and Latin America, such as Santeria, advocates cutting up animals and leaving them in a "special place."

Believers in those religions cook and eat the animals once the sacrifice is completed, she said.

"I would assume that it is a distorted practice of some group," said Mitchell, a professor of comparative religious studies at USF for 30 years. "I don't know what their purposes are. I don't know if they are trying to scare somebody."

Santeria is a hybrid of religions, including Roman Catholicism and African Yoruba. Experts say it began in Cuba when African-born slaves, forced to worship as Catholics, blended the religion with their own beliefs.

Voodoo, meanwhile, is a religion practiced mainly in the Caribbean and is based on West African spiritual traditions that also incorporate elements of Catholicism.