NEVA — Two horses died after they became loose and were struck by passing vehicles on Highway 45 Saturday, Sept. 21 just north of Neva, according to separate crash reports recently obtained by the Antigo Journal about the incident.
Each horse was struck by a separate vehicle just after 7 p.m. between Branch Road and Bagly Lane. Langlade County Sheriff’s Officers were already at the scene trying to locate the horses.
The first horse was struck by a Pelican Lake woman traveling southbound in a Dodge Grand Caravan. Neither the woman nor her family member who was in the passenger seat were injured, but the horse was later found dead, and the car was totaled.
“The whole passenger corner, the bumper, and everything behind it was pushed back into the engine compartment,” Marlin Zimmerman, the owner of Central Wisconsin Towing, said.
“What was interesting to me was that everything got crunched up and hit the windshield — typically, a normal deer hit doesn’t hit the windshield like that, but a horse is much taller obviously, and so it just pretty much crunched up that whole passenger corner, quarter panel, and everything in the corner was just pretty much gone.”
Zimmerman said the vehicle’s occupants were fortunate not to be injured.
“Horse hits are not good because they’re so tall that typically, when you hit them, the body flips back and comes right through the windshield,” he said. “I don’t know exactly why this one was different except that I think it was kind of a glancing blow. It wasn’t a dead-on horse in the middle of the road — I don’t know if they swerved or what happened, but it hit there at the corner instead of right in the middle.”
Dale Kokesch was driving with his wife north to their home in Saint Germain when he said he slowed down after seeing police vehicles along the side of the road, as well as what he believes was a hand-drawn horse cart.
Darkness had fallen and it had begun to rain, and he said they were glancing at the cart as they passed by when they heard a large crash. Only later did he realize he had hit a horse — a different one than the Pelican Lake woman had hit.
“I never saw the horse at all,” Kokesch said. “The car I was in was a Mercury Grand Marquis and it sits pretty low to the ground. When I looked up, when I heard the first bump or bang, I looked up and I thought, ‘My God, that thing is huge. I don’t know what it is.’ I didn’t know what I hit. My wife just looked at me and she says, ‘What was that?’ She had been looking the other direction at that rickshaw. As it turned out, it probably was a blessing that she was doing that, because it hit that windshield on her side and she may have gotten glass in her eyes if she hadn’t been turned around.”
The horse Kokesch hit was later located and dispatched. His car sustained relatively serious damage, including what he described as “an imprint of the whole head” in the windshield.
“I would say that there’s probably 20 percent of the windshield you can’t really see out of because it’s all fractured,” he said. “But we drove the car home after that. I mean, the officer asked if we needed a tow. The whole situation was kind of hectic and chaotic as far as I’m concerned, but I think he did the right thing.”
The night of the accident, Kokesch thought perhaps the horses had gotten loose from the hand-drawn cart, but according to Zimmerman, they had escaped from a nearby fenced-in enclosure.
The crash report did not provide a reason as to how the horses had escaped. As of Thursday morning, the Sheriff’s Office also had not explained the reason they were running free, but did confirm that the horses’ owner was not cited for the incident.
“To cite or not cite is a discretionary act of enforcement provided to every officer in most cases,” Langlade County Sheriff Mark Westen wrote in an email. “In this case, the owner did not knowingly permit the horses to run loose and subsequently the only statute that I could find would not have been appropriate anyway.”
Kokesch said the vehicle was older, and he only had liability insurance on it.
“I wanted to know whose horse it was to see if I could get them to repay for the cost of the vehicle,” Kokesch said. “But I don’t know if I’m even going to do that. I don’t know the whole story. If you hit a deer, you hit a deer. That’s an act of nature. It’s not like I was out driving in the pasture looking to hit a horse.”
As of Wednesday, Kokesch said the Sheriff’s Office had not contacted him, though he still wanted information about how exactly the horses had gotten loose so close to a highway.
“The whole thing is just kind of goofy to me. What were two horses doing on the road? That’s what I would like to know. Why were two horses on the road?” he said. “I had four or five really bad nights because I kept thinking how that could have gone terribly wrong. If that horse comes across the hood and into the vehicle, I don’t think we would have lived through that, and that still bothers me.”
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