RALEIGH — After Jennifer Jeffries caught a foot-long turtle in her front yard Sunday afternoon, she and her three young children set out to drop it off in a South Raleigh fishing hole. Jeffries, 24, figured on a serene trip, where the children also could feed the ducks.
But when the family arrived at the fishing hole, they saw a scene out of a horror movie. A shotgun was propped against a car and a machete lay in the grass. When Jeffries got ready to release the turtle, a man sitting in a metal folding chair warned her that if she dropped the reptile in the water, he would kill it, she told police.
Then, the man lifted the machete and slashed the head off another turtle caught on his fishing line, according to police reports.
“We’ve been killing a lot of them,” Jeffries recalled the man saying. “We’ve been shooting them because they keep biting my fishing line.”