Champion or cheat? Steer costs teen county prize

At this time of year, the El Paso County fairgrounds are blanketed with snow and the barn where the 4-H kids groomed their farm animals for last summer’s county fair is filled with a penetrating cold.

The winners have long since collected their prizes. The animals have been sent to slaughter.  And the youngsters still eligible to enter 4-H contests are in the process of raising new animals for the 2010 fair.

Everybody’s moved on, except for the family of 18-year-old  Kristie Frates, who owned a 1,328-pound steer named “Griffin.”

A 4-H member since she was 13, Frates has raised  cashmere goats, sheep, steers and heifers. “Cows are, like, my thing. They’re my passion. Sheep are too.”

Frates was especially enamored with Griffin, a 6-month-old steer she purchased in New Mexico for $2,500.

Griffin was transported to her home  in Calhan in eastern El Paso County where over the next six months or so she lavished attention on him. She fed and bathed him, made sure his hooves were trimmed, and  his shots were up to date.

In the days leading up to the fair, she began putting Griffin in a “cold room” in the barn during the day and letting him out at night.

The cold temperatures and the darkness promote hair growth, she explained, and by the time Griffin was ready for the county fair, his hair was copper-colored and thick.  He had also doubled in size and was square as a billboard.

In the world of steers, blocky is beautiful and he was crowned the grand champion market steer. Kristie was elated.

But what should have been a jubilant day turned into a disaster when she and the steer were hustled back to a chute where Robert DeAngelo, the fair veterinarian, and nearly two dozen other people were waiting.

After examining the animal, DeAngelo concluded the steer had been injected with air or some other substance to bulk up its physique and make it more attractive to the judges. “We have a problem,” he was quoted as saying.

In five dizzying minutes, Kristie had gone from being called a champion to being called a cheater. She burst into tears. A friend told her to turn away so the crowd couldn’t see her.

 “The only reason I was crying was because DeAngelo made a huge sniff about it,” she said in a recent interview. “I got to experience the stardom of grand champion for about five minutes and then it was all taken away from me.”

 It’s also been a devastating experience for Kristie’s parents, Linnea and David, who are now divorced but have lived their entire lives in the small towns of Calhan,  Simla, and Peyton that dot the plains east of Colorado Springs.

“I can’t go in into the grocery store without somebody asking me about it. I can’t go the feed store without somebody asking. You get tired of going places,” said Linnea.

Still, the cloud of suspicion hangs over the family. “Even with her name cleared, she’ll always be branded a cheater,” said Linnea.

 David Frates said the whole affair was so rushed that the family never had an opportunity to bring in their own experts to get a second opinion. “Everybody jumped on the bandwagon,” he said. “No one stood up for Kristie.”

The affair began on July 23, 2009, when DeAngelo stopped in at the Short Stop Store in Calhan to get a Diet Pepsi, according to a report by the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

One of Kristie’s friends, Noel Augustine, told DeAngelo that  she had been helping Kristie bathe Griffin a couple of days earlier and noticed that he had a “mushy” feeling behind his shoulder. When she rinsed the area with a hose, it sounded like an “empty bucket.”

Noel suspected that Griffin had been aired, a procedure in which air or some other substance is injected beneath the animal’s hide to make it appear more muscled. The altered flesh, according to authorities, feels like bubble wrap.

A large-gauge needle and compressor is often needed to get the air through the animal’s thick hide. Because the procedure is complex and painful, authorities say, it’s usually done by adults and anesthesia is administered.

DeAngelo told investigators that it was “obvious” that Griffin had been aired. “It felt like air pockets, gaseous,” he added. Several other officials, including another vet, a fair official, and a sheriff’s deputy also detected the bubble-wrap texture when they ran their hands over the animal, according to the sheriff’s reports.

Despite their suspicions, county fair officials decided to let Kristie compete for the grand championship. 

Kristie and her mother said the judge examined both sides of Griffin and found nothing amiss. After Griffin won the championship, urine and blood samples were gathered and Griffin’s were clean, family members said. 

The next morning, Griffin was loaded into a truck and taken to DeAngelo’s office where another veterinarian, Jason Arble, did an ultrasound on the steer.

The ultrasound, according to the sheriff’s reports, revealed pockets of gas on both sides of the steer. Linnea suggested the gas was caused when the animal bloated a few weeks earlier, but Arble said bloating would not have caused the gas that showed up on the ultrasound.

Linnea said she later sent the ultrasound results to a veterinarian in Arkansas who has done similar exams on thousands of other animals. He found no evidence of airing, she said.

After the ultrasound was completed, Kristie was ushered into a room filled with  fair officials, sheriff’s investigators, and a 4-H representative. Her mother was not allowed into the meeting. Kristie was asked about the airing of the steer.

“Why would I do that?” she was quoted as saying. “This is a little county fair. I could see if it was the state fair or the nationals. I can make a phone call right now and take you to see steers that have air injected.”

Kristie said she was rattled by being in the presence of so many adults. What she meant to say was that she had heard of the procedure, but didn’t have any personal knowledge of any animals that had been doctored in that manner. “Seriously, for $5,000 why would I cheat? It’s not a big deal to me. I don’t even care about the money.”

Steers crowned  champions at county fairs win only a few thousand dollars. But the winnings can increase to $50,000 at the state fair and even $100,000 at the National Western Stock Show.

Fair officials offered to drop the matter if Kristie wanted to take the steer home. But after talking things over with her mother, they decided to let the steer go to a public auction. “We had nothing to hide,” said Linnea.

The El Paso County Soil Conservation Society Chapter 23  subsequently purchased Griffin for $5,900.

The following Monday, Griffin was taken to the Simla Frozen Food Locker where he was to be butchered. But the state field veterinarian, Ron Ackerman, wanted to get some samples first. There were numerous people present, including five officials affiliated with the county fair, two sheriff’s deputies, Kristie and her mother.

Kristie said she watched the whole thing. “It was so sad. I cried like a baby.”

Samples were sent to Colorado State University. Meat specialists examined the specimens and found heavy growth of bacteria in the areas where the air was allegedly injected into the animal.

“Ackerman explained the presence of bacteria in the two symmetrical areas on both sides of the steer make it highly unlikely that this was caused by anything but injections,” sheriff’s reports state.

But Linnea Frates maintains the bacteria could have come from Ackerman’s own knife. She said he used the same utensil on the animal’s gut and the shoulder areas. “You slaughter any animal and you have bacteria.”

Even though no charges were filed, Kristie received a letter this fall barring her from participating in any 4-H activities. She said she has other animals that she was grooming for competition, but now she can’t show any of them.

The El Paso County Fair Association’s Junior Livestock Sale Committee also decided to return $4,838 of the $5,900 that Griffin brought at auction. Roughly $962 — the market value of the steer — was sent back to Kristie, and $100 was applied toward a contest premium.

“Tests by the state veterinarian showed that the animal had been tampered with, altering its appearance. This was a clear violation of the rules and 4-H codes of ethics which each 4-Her signs,” according to an attorney’s letter that was read into the minutes.

David Frates said it will take time before the controversy dies down.  In the meantime, he’s instructed his daughter to keep her head high.

 “We’re champions and my daughter’s a grand champion,” he said. “Some people still think she did it, but we know she didn’t do it.”

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Call the writer at 476-4825.