By T. D. Thornton
A Pennsylvania horse owner, who formerly worked as the groom for 2004 GI Kentucky Derby and GI Preakness S. winner Smarty Jones, has had stabling privileges revoked by Parx racing officials after an injured gelding he owned had to be euthanized after being discovered at an equine auction where horses are commonly sold for meat. Sam Elliott, the Parx director of racing, confirmed the ban.
The site www.offtrackthroughbreds.com first reported the story Friday, which further disclosed that the owner, Mario DeJesus-Arriaga, 41, will be allowed to continue to race at Parx while appealing the track's “zero tolerance” owner-responsibility rule to the Pennsylvania Horse Racing Commission.
The Thoroughbred in question is Wolf King (Rock Hard Ten), who last raced at Parx July 6. The gelding finished third in a $10,000 NW2L claimer, but according to the Equibase chart “appeared lame when pulling up and was vanned off.”
Two weeks later, Wolf King was shipped off the track property. On Aug. 3, he was discovered at an equine auction in New Holland, Pennsylvania. Danielle Montgomery, the program administrator for Turning for Home, a Parx-based re-homing program for retired Thoroughbreds, said multiple meat buyers were preparing to bid on the animal.
“We got a call when the horse ended up in the kill pen,” Montgomery told TDN. “When we went to tell [DeJesus-Arriaga] that the horse was there, he did offer to pay the 'bail,' and he did [reimburse Turning for Home $900 for buying] the horse. He said it was his horse, and I'm sure he felt bad about it. But the fact is, it was his due diligence to keep the horse from getting there.”
Montgomery said that DeJesus-Arriaga allowed Turning for Home to retain possession of Wolf King, but that by the time a veterinarian could evaluate the gelding's injury, the horse had been painfully bearing weight on a fractured sesamoid for too long, and euthanasia was recommended.
“This should never happen anywhere,” Elliott said. “But it should absolutely never happen here because their own horsemen's organization has this great, built-in organization that takes care of this problem. Turning for Home is a tremendous program. No horse is rejected. They take them all. So there is absolutely zero reason this should ever happen. To me, it's stunning.”
Elliott said Parx management attempted to act “very deliberately” before barring DeJesus-Arriaga, because track officials realize that their policy, in effect, can “take away how somebody makes a living.”
Elliott added that Miguel Vera, the trainer of Wolf King, has previously worked proactively with Turning for Home to place horses that had been under his care, and that Vera was not found to have taken an active part in Wolf King's transfer to the slaughter auction.
“We determined the owner did not take adequate precaution to protect his horse. It was the owner who made the arrangements for the horse to leave the grounds,” Elliott said. “It was more Turning for Home did the right thing, and then [DeJesus-Arriaga] offered to repay them, which was fine, but it was a little late in my opinion. This horse, there was a video of him getting off the van at the vet clinic, and it made you cry. This horse was scared to come down off the ramp he was so sore.”
TDN attempted to track down a working telephone number for DeJesus-Arriaga to learn his side of the story, but the only number listed as still in service did not accept incoming calls.
It was during attempts to find contact information for DeJesus-Arriaga (who sometimes goes by “Arriaga” without the hyphenated surname), that his connection to the 2004 Derby and Preakness winner became evident.
A number of newspaper articles from 2004 profiled DeJesus-Arriaga in glowing terms, detailing how he had fled Guatemala in 1990 at age 17 to seek a better life in America. In California, he got backstretch jobs working hands-on with horses, and soon worked his way up in the barn of Hall-of-Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas, where he cared for eventual champion Serena's Song.
A Philadelphia Inquirer story noted that during Smarty Jones's elusive chase for the Triple Crown, DeJesus-Arriaga slept only a few feet from the Derby and Preakness winner.
“Every horse he gets his hands on ends up looking like a million dollars,” Smarty Jones's exercise rider said of DeJesus-Arriaga at the time.
Not a subscriber? Click here to sign up for the daily PDF or alerts.
