ATLANTA — Atlanta police say somebody cut open a chain-link fence and used food to lure one of their mounted horses outside.
Around 3:50 a.m. Monday, officers responded to a 911 call about a horse outside the fence along Grant Street SE, site of the Atlanta Police Department Mounted Patrol.
Another officer soon arrived to lead the horse back into the barn.
Atlanta Police Lt. Greg Lyon, commander of the mounted patrol, said somebody – he thinks it’s likely more than one person – cut the fence between 1 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. Monday, using apples, carrots, and feed to lure the horse out. Four other horses were also in the pasture.
“It’s a possibility we could have had almost a half-dozen horses loose,” Lyon said.
The horse is a Tennessee Walker named Cody. Lyon said a veterinarian checked him and found no injuries from the escape, but letting him loose was dangerous.
“The potential for catastrophic injury, life-ending injury, career-ending injury for that horse – to be loose on a city street in the middle of the night – was incredibly high,” Lyon said. “My brain is cycling through the possibilities of how badly this could have gone, and all I can say is we’re extremely lucky that nothing happened to that horse.”
Lyon said police don’t have good surveillance video of the incident and have not identified any suspects, but he thinks it’s possible protesters of the planned public safety training center are to blame.
“Although we’re not ruling out any single group or person responsible for this, we’re very concerned that they could be involved,” Lyon said.
Workers repaired the fence Tuesday morning, and the horses were in the pasture grazing again.
Cody is one of 11 horses in the department’s mounted patrol. Lyon said the horses are invaluable to the department.
“Not only do we patrol the neighborhoods, but we visit schools and conduct career days,” he said.
Police are urging anyone in the area who saw anything early Monday morning to call Crime Stoppers or the Atlanta Police Department.