As reported by My Fox Boston, a man who intentionally slaughtered nine baby ducks by driving a lawnmower over them has pleaded guilty to felony animal-cruelty charges and will spend the next year in the Palm Beach County Jail. Jason Scott Falbo II, an employee of Reliable Lawn Care LLC in West Palm Beach, FL, was on the job when he drove the lawnmower over the ducklings.
Circuit Court judge Glenn Kelley sentenced Falbo on Thursday to a combined three years of probation on nine charges of animal cruelty as well as a domestic battery charge from an incident a month before the killing of the ducks. The first of those years will be spent in the jail.
Boyd Jentzsch, the resident who called Palm Beach County Animal Care & Control, was feeding the female duck and her eleven ducklings outside his home with his wife, Larissa Gontchar, and son. They left the food out by a tree and went inside.
Jentzsch and Gontchar were at the door of their house when they observed Falbo riding on a lawn mower. Falbo started to head toward the mother and her baby ducks when he then “ran directly over the ducklings and body parts were scattered all over the lawn,” the police report said.
“They should have just thrown away the keys,” Jentzsch said to the Palm Beach Post Saturday, when told of Falbo’s sentence. “There is no justification for what he’s done.”
Gontchar and Jentzsch ran out to Falbo yelling at him to stop, but Falbo smiled, backed up his mower, and continued to kill more ducklings. Jentzsch got in front of the mower and asked Falbo what he was doing.
“They were in my path, so I just kept mowing,” the police report quoted Falbo as saying.
Falbo’s employer, Wayne Soini, from Reliable Lawn Care, told Quinones it was Falbo’s first day on the job. He also said Falbo was not mowing the lawn in the right path, but Jentzsch said it was Falbo’s first day driving the mower truck, not his first day on the job, and he had seen Falbo in their neighborhood once or twice before.
The mother duck and four ducklings were able to make it to a nearby lake, but two later drowned from their injuries. Falbo also pleaded guilty at the same time to charges of domestic battery by strangulation, after he got in a fight with his girlfriend about a month before the duck incident. According to the police report, Falbo was upset with his girlfriend when she refused to tell him who she was texting on her phone. He pushed her to the ground, took her by the neck and began choking her, the report stated. Along with the probation and jail time, Falbo must also serve 10 hours of community service each month and have a mental health exam within 30 days after he is released from jail.
