Hundreds turn out for 'BUCKWILD' star Shain Gandee's funeral

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. –  For all his on-camera carousing and cussing, "BUCKWILD" reality TV star Shain Gandee was a publicly proclaimed and baptized Christian, and his mother told hundreds of mourners Sunday that she will see him again.

"I know where Shain is," Loretta Gandee told the family, friends and fans crammed into the Charleston Municipal Auditorium. "He said about a month ago, 'I know when I die I'm going to heaven.'"

Dressed in a hot-pink "Gandee Candy" T-shirt and jeans, she spoke only a few words but bellowed out an unaccompanied hymn, her voice echoing through the auditorium in prayer for their reunion.

Gandee, his 48-year-old uncle, David Gandee, and 27-year-old friend Donald Robert Myers were found dead April 1 in a sport utility vehicle that was partially submerged in a deep mud pit near Sissonville. They had last been seen leaving a bar at 3 a.m.

Autopsies determined all three died of carbon monoxide poisoning, possibly caused by the tailpipe being submerged in mud. That could have allowed the invisible gas to fill the vehicle's cabin.

Shain Gandee, nicknamed "Gandee Candy" by fans, was a breakout star of the show that followed the antics of young friends enjoying their wild country lifestyle. Season one was filmed last year, mostly around Sissonville and Charleston.

The Rev. Randy Campbell told the many young people in the crowd he understands that life bombards them with difficult choices. But he urged them to follow Shain Gandee's lead and embrace their faith now, while they are energetic and engaged.

"This life will hand you a lot of things and call it pleasure, but there is nothing that brings greater joy to a person's heart than serving the Lord," Campbell said. "You may think at this point, you're having fun, but those days will pass."

When they do, he said, God is all that matters.

Cameras were not allowed at the funeral or private family burial in Thaxton Cemetery.

As hundreds filed past the two closed coffins on the auditorium stage, a slideshow of family photos showed the simple life that Shain Gandee lived long before TV cameras started following him.

Set to country music were snapshots of him as a uniformed pee wee football player, as a teenager in a tuxedo for prom, then graduating from high school in a black gown and mortarboard.

In other images, he kissed a bride and held babies. In several, he wore hunting camouflage, displaying a slain buck by its antlers and lining up a batch of gray squirrels on a bench.

Gandee favored four-wheelers, pickups and SUVs over cellphones and computers, and "mudding," or off-road driving, was one of his favorite pastimes.

It was no coincidence some mourners arrived in mud-splattered trucks.

Dreama and Charlie Frampton, who live a few doors down, said Gandee had been playing in the mud since he was 5.

"If it wasn't a four-wheel drive truck," Dreama said, "it was a four-wheeler or a dirt bike."

"He was dedicated to the sport," Charlie added. "That's all you can do out in the country."

Gandee's family asked mourners to wear camouflage or the neon-colored Gandee Candy T-shirts to the service because Shain didn't like to dress up.

Ricky Sater, 23, said his friend would have loved the sea of camo and T-shirts that filled the auditorium.

"He probably would walk in there going, 'BUCKWILD!'" he said.

Sater has known Shain since middle school and last saw him a week ago, when he came over to borrow a pin for a trailer hitch.

"He said, 'See ya, Rick!' and I said, 'See ya, drunk!" recalled Sater, who got the terrible news days later in a phone call.

"My sister told me about it, and it being April Fool's, I thought she was joking. But she wasn't," he said, swallowing hard. "I try to keep my emotions balled up, but I started breaking down about six hours later."

Shooting was underway on season two at the time of Gandee's death, but MTV spokesman Jake Urbanski said film crews were not with him over Easter weekend and hadn't filmed him since earlier that week.

MTV says it will be weeks before producers and cast members decide whether to continue. For now, the network said, everyone is focused on supporting Gandee's family.

Katrina Burdette, 25, of Cross Lanes, didn't know Gandee but is friends with his cast mate, Ashley Whitt. Burdette has watched every episode and wants to see more.

"I think it should go on. Give them time to mourn and everything, but he'd want the show to go on," she said. "He wanted to be in the show and keep it going, so why not — in his memory — keep it going?"

MTV said the half-hour series in the old "Jersey Shore" time slot was pulling in an average of 3 million viewers per episode since its premiere and was the No. 1 original cable series on Thursday nights among 12- to 34-year-olds.

Others, like his neighbors the Framptons, say the show just won't be the same.

"They should just leave well enough alone," Charlie Frampton said.

But he won't object if the show survives. It's bringing people to West Virginia, and he rejects the notion that it portrays the state in a negative light.

"They're just showing what true country is," he said. "It's no worse than that 'Teen Mom.'"

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Obama adviser ups push for background checks- Gun class envisioned by ex-SEAL draws hundreds

Published April 07, 2013

FoxNews.com

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  File: June 19, 2010: Assorted shotguns are displayed on a table at a gun and knife show in White Plains, N.Y.,AP

A top White House official acknowledged Sunday that President Obama knew some of his gun-control initiatives would likely be rejected but defended his efforts and called on Congress to “do the right thing.”

“The president pushed very hard,” White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We knew all of the (proposals) would not pass right away.”

With a proposed ban on semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity gun magazines off the table for now, Obama appears to be focusing his efforts, including the garnering of public support, on getting Congress to agree to universal background checks for gun buyers.

Pfeiffer said the president has “marshaled people to his side” and polls show a large majority of the public supports background checks.

“You cannot get 90 percent of the people to agree on the weather,” Pfeiffer told Fox. “The question is whether Congress is going to do the right thing.”

A final Senate bill was expected to be released this week, when Congress returns from Spring Break. But the voting could be delayed as senators wrangle over the background check issue. The legislation would come about four months after a mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in which 20 first-graders and six adults were killed.

Pfeiffer said the president agrees with the efforts so far of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other senators.

“This is the best response to Newtown and gun violence in the country,” Pfeiffer said.

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State health agencies check hundreds for rabies after transplant death

Public health agencies in five states are assessing the rabies risk for hundreds of people who may have had close contact with an infected organ donor and four transplant recipients, one of whom died, officials said Saturday.

About 200 medical workers, relatives and others were assessed for potential exposure in Maryland, where the man who received an infected kidney died, state veterinarian Katherine Feldman said. She said fewer than two dozen were urged to get the rabies vaccine as a preventive measure.

In Florida, about 90 people were identified as potentially exposed, and three were offered the rabies vaccine as of Friday, state health department spokeswoman Ashley Carr said.

Illinois Department of Public Health spokeswoman Melaney Arnold said the only potential exposures there were people who worked with the patient or the transplanted organ. She said only the organ recipient is receiving rabies treatment.

Health officials in Georgia and North Carolina are also involved in the epidemiological investigation prompted by the Maryland man's death from rabies in late February, nearly 18 months after he got the kidney from a donor in Pensacola, Fla. However, officials in those states didn't respond to requests from The Associated Press about the number of people they're assessing.

Doctors in Florida didn't test the 20-year-old donor for rabies before he died in September 2011. His heart, liver and other kidney went to recipients in Florida, Georgia and Illinois. They started getting the vaccine this month, and none has had rabies symptoms. A rabies expert unconnected to the case, Dr. Rodney Willoughby of Milwaukee, said they have a strong chance of surviving since they haven't shown any symptoms.

Health officials say the virus can be spread through the infected person's saliva and mucous membranes, but human-to-human transmission is rare. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says there has been only one documented instance of transmission by a bite in the U.S.

Feldman said Friday that the search for potential exposure subjects in Maryland was wrapping up. She said medical workers typically take precautions, and "we don't share saliva with that many people in our day-to-day goings about."

CDC spokeswoman Melissa Dankel said investigators are still trying to learn how the transplant donor got infected with the raccoon rabies virus that was found in his brain tissue and that of the Maryland man. She said the donor was an outdoorsman who might have been bitten by a wild animal in his native North Carolina before moving to Florida and beginning training as an Air Force aviation mechanic 17 weeks before his death.

He visited a clinic at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in August 2011 for abdominal pain and vomiting and was transferred to a civilian hospital four days later, said Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia Smith. He later developed encephalitis, a brain inflammation that can have a host of causes, including rabies, but he wasn't tested for the disease, CDC officials say.

Smith said the airman died of severe gastroenteritis — inflammation of the stomach and small intestine — complicated by dehydration, electrolyte abnormalities and seizure. The Florida Department of Health said he died of encephalitis of unknown origin.

Federal rules require organ banks to disclose any known or suspected infectious conditions that might be transmitted by donor organs. CDC officials say they don't know what information was communicated.

Federal guidelines published last year for evaluating organ donors with encephalitis urge "extreme caution" if the suspected cause is a viral pathogen, such as rabies.

Dr. Michael Green, a University of Pittsburgh professor who heads the committee that wrote the guidelines, said the guidelines hadn't been published when the Florida patient died. He also said rabies transmission through solid organ transplants is rare. There have been just two other documented instances worldwide — one in Germany and a 2004 U.S. case in which all four recipients died. The CDC says there have been eight documented instances of rabies being transmitted by transplanted corneas.

"Nonetheless, if asked whether or not I would use organs where concern for rabies was active in the potential donor, I would urge extreme caution before using organs from this person," Green said.

One of the patients who died in the 2004 case was 18-year-old Joshua Hightower, of Gilmer, Texas, after a kidney transplant. He had kidney problems since he was a child. His mother, Jennifer, said Saturday that if rabies is suspected in a transplant donor, doctors should go ahead and transplant the organs, and then give recipients the rabies vaccine.

"The word has got to get out there and something's got to change," she said. "These people, like my son, he thought the transplant was going to give him a new life and a new opportunity to move forward, and it killed him — over somebody's negligence and their plain old stupidity, and that's what it is."

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Agency kills hundreds of pets, endangered species

It was an August morning two years ago when Maggie, a spry, 7-year-old border collie, slipped through the backyard fence of her family's suburban Oregon home. Minutes later, she was dead – her neck snapped by a body-gripping trap set by the U.S. government less than 50 feet from the home she shared with the four children who loved her.   

"It is an image that will never leave me," Maggie’s owner, Denise McCurtain, of Gresham, Ore., said of her death. "She was still breathing as we tried to remove the trap. Her eyes were open and she was looking at me. All I could say was 'I’m trying so hard. You didn’t do anything wrong.'"

Maggie’s death at a minimum was one of hundreds of accidental killings of pets over the last decade acknowledged by Wildlife Services, a little-known branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that is tasked with destroying animals seen as threats to people, agriculture and the environment. Critics, including a source within the USDA, told FoxNews.com that the government’s taxpayer-funded Predator Control program and its killing methods are random -- and at times, illegal.

Over the years, Wildlife Services has killed thousands of non-target animals in several states – from pet dogs to protected species – caught in body-gripping conibear traps and leg hold snares, or poisoned by lethal M-44 devices that explode sodium cyanide capsules when triggered by a wild animal – or the snout of a curious family pet.

The McCurtains, like many other families, were never informed that such deadly devices were placed so close to their home in grass near the edge of a pond where their young son kicks his soccer ball and their daughter catches turtles.

The traps, set on communal property owned by the neighborhood association, were meant to kill an infestation of nutria, rat-like pests that pose no danger to people but can be harmful to the environment. The only warning sign was a small placard in the grass that identified the device as government property and cautioned against tampering with it. The neighborhood association told the McCurtains it never would have approved such traps had it known they were so deadly.

"It’s unconscionable that anybody with an ounce of common sense would set these traps in an area frequented by the public and their pets," said Brooks Fahy, executive director of Predator Defense, a national watchdog group that advocates non-lethal predator control.

"It’s unconscionable that anybody with an ounce of common sense would set these traps in an area frequented by the public and their pets."

- Brooks Fahy, executive director of Predator Defense

The M-44's intended targets are coyotes that kill or harass livestock primarily in the western states, where Wildlife Services is most active and critical to farmers protecting their livestock. 

But, like Maggie, there often are unintended victims -- like a puppy belonging to J.D. and Angel Walker of Santa Anna, Texas.

In February 2011, the couple's 18-month-old pit bull was killed when it sniffed and pulled on a meat-scented M-44 placed about 900 feet from its home.

Kyle Traweek, the Wildlife Services employee who set the device, violated at least three M-44 restrictions set by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to Texas officials. In a June 6, 2012, letter reprimanding Traweek, the Texas Department of Agriculture said he broke EPA rules by placing the cyanide in an area where "exposure to the public and family and pets is probable."

Click here to read the letter

Traweek is no longer employed by Wildlife Services, although his departure was not related to the incident in Texas, according to a spokeswoman with the Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service (APHIS), a division of the USDA that oversees the program.

It is difficult to verify the number of accidental killings of pets each year by Wildlife Services, in part because many go unrecorded, according to multiple sources.

A management source within the USDA claims Wildlife Services employees are told not to document the accidental killings of pets if it can be avoided.   

"They are told to get rid of the leash and bury the dog," said the source, who spoke to FoxNews.com on condition of anonymity.

The source also alleged that in some instances in Arizona, California and Minnesota, the killings of pets are intentional – often with the knowledge, approval and encouragement of upper level Wildlife Services management.

"There have been cases of them shooting and killing dogs," the source said. "They’ll just claim it was feral, vicious or rabid. They think they can do anything they want."

In court documents obtained by FoxNews.com, Christopher Brennan, a California-based Wildlife Services employee, told a Mendocino County Superior Court judge that he has shot hundreds of "free-ranging" dogs who he claimed were preying on livestock. During the Sept. 1, 2009, hearing – involving a restraining order between Brennan and a neighbor – the judge asked Brennan how many dogs he has killed as a government trapper over the last 10 years.

"Probably close to 400," Brennan replied, according to the court transcript.

Carol Bannerman, an APHIS spokeswoman, confirmed Tuesday that Brennan is still employed as a "wildlife specialist" for the agency. Bannerman claimed Brennan works in an area where there is a large number of unleashed dogs that harass or kill livestock -- and said there is a "significant population" of privately owned guard dogs, mostly pit bulls, that are allegedly left to roam freely so they can protect illegal marijuana crops.  

"None of the feral and free-ranging dogs lethally removed in California last year were non-targets," Bannerman said. "Some non-target dogs were trapped and released."

In January, a Wildlife Services employee was arrested in Arizona and charged with felony animal cruelty after allegedly using a government trap to capture a neighbor’s dog he deemed problematic. The employee, identified as Russell Files, set up the leg-hold device during work hours to trap the animal, which was covered in blood from trying to chew its way out of the device when police arrived on the scene. An APHIS official would not comment on whether Files is still working for the government, citing an ongoing investigation.

Wildlife Services described the overall harm to pets and non-target wildlife as “rare.”

"Wildlife Services provides expert federal leadership to responsibly manage one of our nation's most precious resources -- our wildlife," APHIS spokeswoman Tanya Espinosa said in a statement. “We seek to resolve conflict between people and wildlife in the safest and most humane ways possible, with the least negative consequences to wildlife overall.”

The program said that accidental killings account for less than one percent of wildlife removed for damage concerns – and claimed that number is even lower for pets.

Wildlife Services, which has been in place since 1895, touts its mission as critical, priding itself on protecting the country’s agriculture and natural resources from destructive wildlife – damage that can be costly for landowners and businesses.

According to a 2010 report by the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), U.S. farmers and ranchers spent $188 million during 2010 on non-lethal ways to protect their land and livestock. That number has declined from 2006, when NASS estimated annual investments in non-lethal methods to be at $199 million.

The USDA says that despite such investments, approximately 647,000 cattle, sheep and goat are killed by predators each year, resulting in an annual loss of more than $137 million. The lost animals do not include chickens and turkeys.

But Carson Barylak, federal policy adviser of the Animal Welfare Institute, is skeptical of the USDA’s statements. She said the danger posed by predatory animals is exaggerated.

"The very reports that Wildlife Services cite for these figures show that [attacks by wild predators have] a relatively small impact on the livestock industry. In the case of cattle, for instance, under a quarter of a percent of the nation’s stock was lost to predators in 2010 according to the program's records."

The exact number of pet animals and protected species killed over the years by the agency is one that will likely never be known.

A report by the Sacramento Bee, which investigated the program last year, claimed its employees have accidentally killed more than 50,000 non-target animals since 2000, including federally protected golden and bald eagles. The newspaper also reported that more than 1,100 dogs, including family pets, were destroyed by government traps or poison within those same years. Other known cases include serious injuries to pets that result in leg amputations, as well as harm to humans who come in contact with the cyanide.

Doug McKenna, a longtime criminal investigator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – a separate agency that falls under the Department of Interior – said he probed many killings of non-predatory and protected species by Wildlife Services over the years.

"The Bald Eagle is a scavenger bird, so of course if it flies down to investigate a carcass that is placed near a leg hold trap, it will get caught in it," he said. If the trap is not checked in a timely manner, the eagle is left to die. Such deaths are a violation of federal law, like the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, first passed in 1940.

McKenna said that in the case of M-44 cyanide devices, state governments must grant employees permission to place them as well as post warning signs for the public.

"Any access point into the property has to have signs that M-44’s are being used and it has to be in English and Spanish," he said.   

For pet owners, seeking legal recourse against the government is a daunting and tedious process – requiring individuals to file a tort claim that typically results in families losing more money even if they win.

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"Most people do not pursue litigation when they realize the financial cost, the time involvement and the limit on recovery for damages being the actual value of their pet," said Oregon-based attorney Daniel Stotter, who handles many of these cases.  

"The bottom line is that the federal government has limited liability in all lawsuits involving tort claims, damage to property or persons. You can sue the federal government for certain things, like negligence, but you cannot seek punitive damages," he said, adding that victims are responsible for covering their own legal fees.  

“The government knows that when they injure or kill an animal, they're more likely to not have financial repercussions," he said.

For families like the McCurtains and Walkers, there is no price to be paid for the emotional toll of losing a pet.  

"It is losing a member of the family," Angel Walker said. "You can’t really get past it."

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