Fishing captain sentenced for shooting, poisoning dolphins in Gulf of America
Show Caption
Hide Caption
NOAA app to help dolphins, whales, other marine animals
The Dolphin and Whale 911 app lets you easily report a marine mammal in need of help.
Problem Solved
A "longtime charter and commercial fishing captain" is in deep waters after poisoning and shooting dolphins in the Gulf of America, formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico, federal authorities said.
Zackery Brandon Barfield, 31, of Panama City, Florida, was sentenced to 30 days in prison and ordered to pay a $51,000 fine months after pleading guilty to three counts of poisoning and shooting dolphins in violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, the Northern District of Florida announced on May 23.
"The Gulf of America is a vital natural resource," Acting U.S. Attorney Michelle Spaven said in a statement. "The defendant's selfish acts are more than illegally poisoning and shooting protected animals – they are serious crimes against public resources, threats to the local ecosystem, and a devastating harm to a highly intelligent and charismatic species."
Barfield, who's been a licensed charter and commercial fishing captain in the Panama City area throughout his adulthood, poisoned and shot bottlenose dolphins on multiple occasions from 2022 to 2023, the U.S. attorney's office said, citing court documents and statements made in court. He pleaded guilty to his crimes in February, court records show.
When did Barfield begin poisoning and shooting dolphins?
Federal prosecutors reference a time in the summer of 2022 when Barfield became frustrated with the dolphins eating red snapper from the lines of his charter fishing clients. To rid the problem, he began placing methomyl, a highly toxic pesticide that's harmful to humans and wildlife, inside baitfish to poison the dolphins that came up near his boat, according to the U.S. attorney's office.
Methomyl is restricted by the Environmental Protection Agency to control flies in non-residential settings, federal prosecutors said. Despite knowing the toxicity of methomyl, Barfield continued to feed poisoned baitfish to the dolphins for months, including on an estimated six to seven charter trips, the U.S. attorney's office said.
While Barfield was captaining fishing trips in December 2022 and the summer of 2023, he used a 12-gauge shotgun to shoot at least five dolphins when he saw them eating snapper from his client's fishing lines, federal officials said, adding that he killed one during this period. Other times, Barfield shot but did not immediately kill dolphins near his boat.
Barfield shot a dolphin in front of elementary-aged children
The U.S. attorney's office said on one trip, Barfield shot a dolphin while two elementary-aged children were aboard his boat, along with more than a dozen fishermen.
"He knew the regulations protecting dolphins, yet he killed them anyway — once in front of children," Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson, of the DOJ's Environment and Natural Resources Division, said in a statement.
How did federal authorities find out about Barfield's crimes?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration learned about Barfield's behaviors in 2023 when one of its special agents received a tip about a fisherman killing bottlenose dolphins, the government agency said, adding that this information culminated in a two-year investigation.
Evidence obtained throughout the investigation determined that Barfield fed between 24-70 dolphins poison-laden baitfish on charter trips that he captained, according to the NOAA. When asked why, the captain said he was "frustrated with dolphins stealing his catch," the government agency said.
From 2014 to 2024, there were 21 known intentional dolphin killings from gunshot wounds, arrows, explosives and other sharp objects, the NOAA said.
"There are consequences to individuals who decide to harm protected and endangered species," Paige Casey, acting assistant director of the NOAA Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement Southeast Division, said in a statement. "We take these types of actions seriously and we will exhaust any and all leads related to marine mammal deaths to prosecute bad actors to the full extent of the law."
Barfield's prison sentence will be followed by a one-year term of supervised release, the U.S. attorney's office said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hamilton Spectator
30-07-2025
- Hamilton Spectator
The Latest: Trump offers no details about improving food distribution in Israeli-controlled Gaza
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. will partner with Israel to run new food centers in Gaza to address the worsening humanitarian crisis there, but few details have been offered amid a growing outcry at home and abroad to do more to address starvation in Gaza. Trump said during his return from golfing in Scotland that Israel must 'make sure the distribution is proper.' Meanwhile Trump's Environmental Protection Agency has proposed revoking the scientific 'endangerment finding' that underpins U.S. regulations to fight climate change . The administration is pressing for a deal with Harvard University that would require the Ivy League school to pay far more than the $200 million fine agreed to by Columbia University. And Senate Republicans confirmed former Trump lawyer Emil Bove for a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge , dismissing whistleblower complaints that he encouraged Justice Department lawyers to ignore court orders. Here's the latest: Trump says Epstein 'stole' young women from Mar-a-Lago spa, including Virginia Giuffre Trump said Tuesday that Jeffrey Epstein 'stole' young women who worked for the spa at Mar-a-Lago, the latest evolution in his description of how their highly scrutinized relationship ended years ago. One of the women, he acknowledged, was Virginia Giuffre , who was among Epstein's most well-known sex trafficking accusers. Trump's comments expanded on remarks he had made a day earlier, when he said he had banned Epstein from his private club in Florida two decades ago because his one-time friend 'stole people that worked for me.' At the time, he did not make clear who those workers were. The Republican president has faced an outcry over his administration's refusal to release more records about Epstein after promises of transparency, a rare example of strain within Trump's tightly controlled political coalition. Trump has attempted to tamp down questions about the case, expressing annoyance that people are still talking about it six years after Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial, even though some of his own allies have promoted conspiracy theories about it. ▶ Read more about Trump's comments on Epstein Senate confirms Trump lawyer Emil Bove for appeals court, pushing past whistleblower claims The Senate confirmed former Trump lawyer Emil Bove 50-49 for a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge Tuesday as Republicans dismissed whistleblower complaints about his conduct at the Justice Department. Emil Bove, attorney for former US President Donald Trump, sits Manhattan criminal court during Trump's sentencing in the hush money case in New York, Jan. 10, 2025. (Jeenah Moon/Pool Photo via AP, file) A former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove was on Trump's legal team during his New York hush money trial and defended Trump in the two federal criminal cases. He will serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Democrats have vehemently opposed Bove's nomination, citing his current position as a top Justice Department official and his role in the dismissal of the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. They have also criticized his efforts to investigate department officials who were involved in the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Bove has accused FBI officials of 'insubordination' for refusing to hand over the names of agents who investigated the attack and ordered the firing of a group of prosecutors involved in those Jan. 6 criminal cases. ▶ Read more about Bove Trump's latest tariff deadline is approaching The clock is ticking closer to Trump's latest tariff deadline of Aug 1. And while several more deals — or at least frameworks for deals — have been reached since his last tariff deadline of July 9 came and went, trade talks with many countries are still in flux. Trump unveiled sweeping import taxes on goods coming into the U.S. from nearly every country back in April. That included heightened so-called reciprocal rates for certain countries, the bulk of which have since been postponed twice. The first 90-day pause arrived in an apparent effort to quell global market panic and facilitate country-by-country negotiations. But three months later, only two deals emerged. And by early July, Trump began sending warning letters that higher tariffs would be imposed against dozens of countries on Aug. 1. Since then, the U.S. has announced trade frameworks with the European Union, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia. But, key details remain sparse — or not immediately captured in writing. ▶ Read more about agreements so far Trump says US will partner with Israel to run additional food centers in Gaza, but details are scant Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. will partner with Israel to run new food centers in Gaza to address the worsening humanitarian crisis there , but he and U.S. officials offered few additional details about the plan or how it would differ from existing food distribution centers. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he returned from a trip to Scotland that Israel would preside over the new food centers 'to make sure the distribution is proper.' 'We're going to be dealing with Israel, and we think they can do a good job of it,' Trump said. The opaque details come as the Trump administration is facing calls at home and abroad to do more to address the hunger crisis in Gaza . The U.S.'s close ally, Israel, is at the center of an international outcry as more images of emaciated children continue to emerge. The White House described it as 'a new aid plan' to help people in Gaza obtain access to food and promised that details would emerge. It did not elaborate. ▶ Read more about the plan Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Fox News
28-06-2025
- Fox News
Diver who freed sharks gets Trump pardon after felony conviction stuns him: 'My heart sank'
A Florida-based diver thought he was doing the right thing when he freed a group of sharks—but instead, it led to a felony charge and, years later, a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. On May 28, Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr. were two of the sixteen recipients of Trump's full pardons after the pair were convicted in 2020 of theft of property within special maritime jurisdiction. Mansell, 31, of Jupiter, Fla., reflected on the fateful day leading to his conviction and the eventual unexpected pardon from the White House. In April 2020, Mansell and Moore took a group, which included the Kansas City police chief and a SWAT officer, and encountered a buoy connected to a longline over a dive site. A longline is a type of deep-sea fishing gear with baited hooks to catch fish. "It was just another ordinary day on the water," Mansell said. "I had been running trips there for years and never had anything like this happen. I spotted something red in the distance thinking that, you know, maybe it was trash or a diver," he said. "We saw that it was a buoy connected to a line, which is when we started calling law enforcement." Unaware that the longline belonged to a legally sanctioned National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shark research operation, Mansell and his team acted swiftly and cut the line. They released 19 sharks back into the ocean. "I had no idea that this could be possible, you know, that you could have a permit to kill all these sharks," he said, noting that they had called the Florida Wildlife Commission (FWC) and NOAA's hotline before making the decision. "In our mind, the entire time, we thought we were uncovering a crime rather than committing a crime," he said. That belief quickly unraveled. Days later, Mansell said he received a call while out to dinner. "I just felt like my world came to a stop, my heart sank," he said. "We called [law enforcement], we did everything that we could." Despite their outreach to law enforcement, both divers were charged and convicted. While they avoided prison time, they were ordered to pay $3,343.72 in restitution, and the felony convictions prevented them from voting, owning firearms and traveling freely. "The judge made a comment, and he commended us for our dedication to [the] environment," he said. "He gave out what my lawyer said was probably the lowest sentence ever." Looking back, Mansell said he would have acted differently if he had known the law surrounding legal shark killings. "Knowing what I know now, I absolutely would do things completely differently," he said. "But if I didn't know that there were permits for this, I don't think that I would change anything… when you think you're doing the right thing, you think you're doing the right thing." "We were really surprised to get the pardon," he added. "It wasn't really discussed by my lawyers because it was so far down the line." A turning point came when the case went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and Judge Barbara Lagoa confirmed what Mansell believed throughout the legal process. "She basically said … this should've never gone forward … she's never come across a criminal that has called enforcement to report what they're doing in real time," he said. Publicity from that opinion reached the libertarian Cato Institute, which published an article that eventually caught the attention of the White House. "The White House actually called our lawyers and said that they were looking into this and asked for more information," he said. "That was really cool because our lawyer called us that the White House had it in front of them and were looking into it." Mansell learned of his pardon while boarding a plane, sharing he was left "speechless" from the news. "I was getting a call from my lawyer and I answered, and he says, 'Well, I've got good news for you. You just got a full presidential pardon.' I was speechless. I couldn't even say thank you. I just soaked it in." Mansell profusely thanked the White House and Trump for the pardon. "All I can say is thank you. And I hope that, you know, maybe in the name of sharks, we can all take a look at what's happening and say that [legal killings of sharks] shouldn't be happening in Florida." "I'm just so grateful. I have said thank you every step of the way. Words can't explain it," he said. "I know that the White House took a look at this and they decided it was worth it. And I got President Trump's signature." Though the felony remains technically on record, Mansell said the practical implications of the pardon allow him to continue his work. "The felony is fully forgiven so now I can vote, and I can own a firearm from what I understand," he said. "And most importantly, it expedites getting travel visas for my work in conservation." Asked how his view of government and justice had evolved, Mansell admitted, "At first, I was like, I lost a lot of faith in it. I felt like it was just unfair, but now I'm thankful for the due process." "I've learned so much through this process," he said. "I've always considered myself a law-abiding citizen, somebody that doesn't break the law and I respect law enforcement and commercial fisherman." "I got through into this political battle between commercial fisheries and shark diving tourism and it's tough, but now I'm on the other side," he said. "At first I lost a lot of faith in the criminal justice system and now, a bit of that faith in the justice system is restored. There are a lot of checks and balances for a reason." Mansell remains committed to shark conservation and hopeful his case will raise awareness. "This case never should have been filed," Mansell's attorney, Ian Goldstein, said in a statement. "These gentlemen made an honest mistake and were trying to save sharks from what they believed to be an illegal longline fishing setup. I can't think of two individuals more deserving of a Presidential Pardon."
Atlantic
18-06-2025
- Atlantic
A Provocative Argument About What Creates Serial Killers
Caroline Fraser grew up in an area defined by unexpected, stochastic bursts of brutality. By the time she was a teen, in the 1970s, she knew of multiple people in and around her Mercer Island, Washington, community who'd died violently: Some were murdered; others had killed themselves. Intimate-partner violence was often a factor. So, too, was the floating bridge connecting the island to Seattle, where accidental deaths happened at an alarming rate. There was menace and dread in her own home as well, thanks to her father. Even after Fraser left, she found that she couldn't shake thoughts of the violence. She was captivated by the sheer number of serial killers running amok in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and '80s. Why, she wanted to know, did there seem to be so many men, born during or just after World War II, killing scores of women—frequently strangers to them—in brutal, compulsive ways? Men such as the Green River Killer, the Happy Face Killer, and the I-5 Killer operated mainly in Washington and Oregon, burglarizing homes, menacing hitchhikers, raping co-eds, and dumping bodies. Only when they were caught were faces put to those nicknames: Gary Ridgway, Keith Jesperson, Randall Woodfield, and their ilk became subjects of widespread fascination and horror. Today, those men—the Ted Bundys of the world, to name the most famous example—remain valuable grist for the dozens of true-crime books, podcasts, and documentaries put out each year. When Fraser, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, began looking into the project that would become her new book, Murderland, which is both a memoir of growing up during the serial-killing era and a unique investigation into its potential causes, she found a 'rising tide of inconceivable deviance,' she writes. It was localized to a specific time and place, and reproduced almost nowhere else in the country, without a larger explanation. And to Fraser's frustration, even in the 21st century, true-crime chroniclers mostly didn't probe the possibility of a systemic explanation for all of this death. But Fraser had an idea, one she'd not seen explored. When she was young, and when these men were terrorizing her region, industrial smelters were extracting elements such as iron, copper, lead, aluminum, and zinc from ores. Those plants were also pumping out continuous plumes of toxic vapors, releasing lead and arsenic into the environment. During the years that the smelters operated, these elements were present in the air; even after the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963 and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, their airborne assaults were only beginning to taper off. Fraser kept finding threads between environmental catastrophe and murder, and in Murderland, she makes the unconventional argument that the rise of serial killing has deep roots in the creation of industrial waste. The connection isn't as far-fetched as it may appear. Data bear out the relationship between elevated lead presence and increased crime rates. A 2022 meta-analysis of two dozen papers provided more evidence for the connection, and noted that exposure to lead, a neurotoxin, might amplify aggressive and impulsive behaviors. Once its harms were fully understood, leaded gasoline, a major source of exposure, was phased out beginning in 1973; it was fully out of use by 1996. New lead paint and lead pipes were also banned in the 1970s and '80s. In 1994, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the mean blood lead levels of those aged 1 to 74 declined 78 percent from 1976 to 1991. Children born after these interventions had less exposure than those raised in the decades before. Now consider the sharp drop in violent crime, particularly murder, in the country's most populated metro area, New York City, starting in the 1990s, after a terrifying peak of 2,245 murders in 1990. As of this writing, there have been 112 murders in all five boroughs in 2025, the lowest number in city history, according to the New York City Police D epartment. Two generations of NYC children have grown up with minimal lead presence in city apartment buildings, and academics such as the Amherst College economics professor Jessica Wolpaw Reyes have argued that lower levels of lead exposure in childhood correlate to reduced criminality. Setting up a tripartite structure of murder, industrial history, and memoir is a complicated task. Fraser comes close to pulling it off, as Murderland is wonderfully propulsive and hard to put down. But in casting about for a grand unified theory connecting serial murder to a larger environmental phenomenon, Fraser falls into a trap I've taken to calling the 'Bundy Problem': Whenever he's present in a story, even if the focus turns elsewhere, he dominates it; the abominable details of his myth, such as the sheer number of his victims and the enraging failures of law enforcement, take up all the available air. Bundy is the malware of narrative. By focusing on him, Fraser relegates her thesis about the damage done by pollution to the background. More important, Bundy's actual victims, the dozens of women and girls whose lives he snuffed out, grow ever dimmer. 'Welcome to the crazy wall,' Fraser announces in the book's introduction. She compares her investigation to the trope of crime obsessives or TV detectives who stew over a board full of clues and ephemera, pushing 'pins into wall maps, trying to find the pattern, to analyze, to snatch a cloud and pin it down.' At best, they may come up with the culprit; at worst, they tumble into the dark realm of conspiracy theory. Fraser is ready to show her work, piecing together her collection of pictures, timelines, and surveys 'until the whole thing resembles a graph of sheer lunacy, a visual eruption of obsession.' Fraser, most recently the author of a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won a Pulitzer, seems an unlikely candidate to spend years of her life marinating in the granular minutiae of serial killers. But she has explored facets of violence and narrative in several essays published by The New York Review of Books, including two on Joyce Carol Oates and a separate 2021 article, 'Murder Is My Business,' on the state of true crime (full disclosure: She included my 2020 anthology, Unspeakable Acts, in her article). That last essay, Fraser acknowledges, 'proved essential in contemplating' the project that became Murderland. Fraser doesn't believe it's a coincidence that would-be serial murderers grew up near industrial sites expelling heavy metals. Ted Bundy, the author's main case study, was born in 1946 to an unwed mother with uncertain paternity and raised in the Skyline neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington, as leaded-gas fumes wafted through the streets. Gary Ridgway, the future Green River Killer, was born three years after Bundy and resided a couple of miles from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where highway and jet-fuel vapors mixed with the lead-loaded air. Even the cross-country-traveling serial murderer Israel Keyes, not born until 1978, had a childhood connection to a remaining industrial plant in the Colville, Washington, area. The author lays much of the blame at the feet of two Gilded Age families: the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims. The Rockefellers made their money in oil, and the Guggenheims in mining; they would later both own (and fight for control of) the profitable American Smelting and Refining Company, later known as ASARCO. ASARCO ended up all over the country, but Tacoma proved particularly attractive for its potential access to minerals. For nearly a century, a smokestack hundreds of feet high shot lead and arsenic into the sky. But the dangers of smelting weren't unknown. In 1913, the chemist Frederick Gardner Cottrell wrote: 'The problem of smelter smoke is entirely distinct from that of ordinary city smoke.' Components such as zinc, sulfur dioxide, lead, and arsenic, he continued, 'cannot be simply 'burnt up.'' Instead, they linger in the air, are absorbed into the bloodstream, make their way into the soil, and get passed down from mothers to fetuses. Those living in proximity to a smelter plant were experiencing a slow-motion health disaster. Fraser writes about how ASARCO, like tobacco companies, attempted to downplay the dangers. By the 1970s, the company's claims strained credibility. At the same time, a seeming plague of serial murder was reaching an apex. Fraser juxtaposes the rise and fall of smelting with Bundy's escalating spree of crimes, characterizing each murder he committed not only as an individual act of abrupt violence, but also as one part of a wider system of senselessness. The story ought to be, she argues, that the oligarchs who saw opportunity and profit in an industry that would sicken scores of Americans also created an even more disturbing by-product in the form of these murders. But although Fraser does her damnedest to avoid it, Bundy repeatedly steals focus from the muck of smelter waste. Perhaps it's inevitable that systemic, slow-motion violence feels less dramatic than individuals killing individuals: After all, these men actively chose, sometimes again and again, to end another person's life. The fumes are certainly easier to ignore or deny than the visceral, immediate violence of serial murder—which is much rarer, and yet, for many, much more frightening. Fraser works tirelessly to make her correlations convincing. Her anger at environmental destruction, at men's capacity to hate and murder women in wholly novel ways, and at the indifference of American society is clear. But even though I was carried along by the narrative, I wondered if adding 'a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma' truly offered the explanation she sought. Other factors may have played a role in the overall reduction of crime rates since lead was phased out of American daily life: increased police presence in major cities; the growing sophistication of detecting and matching DNA evidence; surveillance, with cameras—in pockets, on buildings—absolutely everywhere. And different social-impact theories have also been put forward: The economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt have connected legalized abortion with lower crime rates, for example. The serial-killing era, which saw more than 100 of these murderers acting simultaneously in a given year, is firmly in the rearview mirror, and rates of other violent acts have trended downward since the mid-1990s. The Bundy Problem may help explain why Americans perceive modern crime rates, especially rape and murder, as sky-high—an understanding not rooted in reality. Male-on-female violence is, undeniably, a continuing scourge. But culturally, we tend to ignore its most common manifestations—60 percent of murdered women are killed by an intimate partner or family member—in favor of the vivid image of girls menaced by outwardly charming but secretly sinister figures, such as Bundy. This is not a formula that allows us to consider how the misogyny that animated many of the serial killers of the 20th century was encouraged or shared by their wider culture. Even Fraser fails to account for this: If elevated lead levels caused the violence, why did it remain skewed along gender lines? (From 1900 to 2010, 88.6 percent of all serial killers, and more than 90 percent of those in the United States, were male; just over 51 percent of their victims, however, were female, though white women were the most likely group to be murdered.) She doesn't fully pursue that question. Nor does she satisfactorily answer why, if industrial pollution was nationwide, there was a serial-killing cluster specifically in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps my own crazy wall is different. It posits that people who end up killing and people who don't aren't initially that much different from one another, and a confluence of random and semi-random events—broken homes, sexual trauma, poverty—might contribute to future violence, but also might not. My wall craves narrative but also knows that human behavior can be mystifying, and that attempting to make order from chaos is doomed to fail. There is value in seeing a bigger picture, and I'm glad to have followed the threads that Fraser unspooled. But there is equal, if not greater, value in accepting what we don't, and can't, know. And if the horrific uptick in serial killing remains an unexplained phenomenon, yet fewer women and girls today suffer from this unspeakable violence, then I can live with that.
