Hundreds of thousands of dollars in trees vandalized at family tree farm
ELIZABETH, Colo. (KDVR) — It was just another Wednesday when Grant Herring, co-owner of Pineco, a tree farm in Elizabeth, went to check up on his trees.
“We came out here to check the irrigation, make sure things were running just with the heat and stuff,” Herring said.
As he walked through the rows of trees, he noticed something wasn’t quite right.
“Noticed a couple were down right, left and the more you looked the worse it got,” Herring said.
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He then realized it was a lot worse than he thought. Their fence had been broken through, trees had been sawed, some trees were missing tops and their drip hoses had been cut.
“From there, we’ve just started taking kind of a rough inventory and we knew within five minutes it was somebody, somebody’s doing,” Herring said. “Wasn’t, you know, Mother Nature or like a rogue wind or anything else. It was obvious.”
Grant Herring walks through his tree farm in Elizabeth (KDVR). It is estimated this is anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 dollars in damages (KDVR). Drip lines all over the tree farm were cut, which Herring said was to prevent water flow to the remaining unharmed trees (KDVR). The vandals likely parked along the main road and cut their way into the tree farm (KDVR). It is suspected the vandals used an electric saw, which would have been quieter (KDVR). Herring said a lot of the cuts were deep enough to kill the tree over time (KDVR).
He said he could tell based on the clean cuts, it was probably done with an electric saw. He also checked with neighbors who said they hadn’t heard anything.
“Electric saws are a lot quieter than gas saws. I mean, they obviously did their homework. They kind of knew what they were doing,” Herring said.
He said there was no real motive for what they had done since they didn’t get anything out of it. But, he did say they had left him with anywhere from a quarter to a half million dollars in damages.
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“It hurts us in a way that you know, we have a crop of trees that they’re just finally getting to the height and size that people are looking for and they know that,” Herring said.
In the meantime, he said he is hoping something will turn up.
“There’s some hope you know with cell phone pings and stuff like that to maybe track who was there at that specific time. Maybe some fingerprints on some of the hoses that were cut.”
Herring added that it’s not so much about the money, it’s about why whoever did what they did.
“It’s just the personal attack against myself, my brother, our family. You know, you don’t go after people’s livelihood. If there’s an issue, you know, knock on the door, you know you don’t just do stuff like this in the middle of the night where nobody can see you. I mean, that speaks volumes of the person who did this.”
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He reported the incident to law enforcement, but he is also offering a $10,000 reward for any information on the vandals.
“We’re prepared to do a lot more than that,” Herring said. “I mean, like I said, it’s not just the money, it’s the basic principle of what was done, you know, and we’ll pay top dollar for anybody who has any information.”
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