Teen-Agers Sentenced for Shooting Donkey in Eye

Two San Fernando Valley youths who blinded a donkey in one eye with a BB gun were sentenced Wednesday to perform 300 hours of community service at an animal shelter.

Jon Ryan Wynott, 18, of West Hills and Mathew Scott Chaney, 18, of Northridge pleaded no contest last month to one felony count of cruelty to animals in the July 9 shooting.

Annie, a donkey owned by Wynott’s neighbor, Larry Pulley, was blinded in the left eye by one of the BBs, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Fisch.

Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Judith Meisels Ashmann also sentenced the two youths to three years probation and ordered them to pay a sum yet to be determined in restitution to Pulley.

The donkey and other animals in Pulley’s back yard had evidently been the source of continued friction between Pulley and Wynott’s family, the probation report said. Pulley told authorities that the animal was his family’s special pet.

In exchange for the no-contest plea, prosecutors agreed to seek no more than one year in County Jail instead of the three years the youths would otherwise have faced, Fisch said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ann Korban said at the time of the plea that the two youths were remorseful. In addition, Chaney, now an architecture student at Cal Poly Pomona, and Wynott, a business student at Cal State Fullerton, have no previous records, Fisch said.

The arrests were made after Pulley photographed the two youths shooting at his donkey from Wynott’s back yard. He later noticed that the animal’s eye had a BB-sized wound and called police, Fisch said.

Chaney, who authorities believe fired the shot that injured the donkey, is quoted in the probation report as saying that he believes he struck the donkey three times, but that he had no idea he had hit the donkey in the eye.