Deer Nuts

Beverly Gay’s stories of what happens behind her home seem to describe the maneuverings of retreating Taliban. The sounds of rifle shots rip through the midnight darkness. A small pickup truck cruises a dirt trail with armed men perched in the bed.

But far from the eastern mountains of Afghanistan, Gay lives in an unassuming twin home on Winthrop Street along a leafy stretch of Pennypack Park.

The war zone she talks of describes the consistent nerve-wracking pattern of U.S. Department of Agriculture sharpshooters hired by Fairmount Park to cull deer.

The shootings, which began in January, finally caused her to snap in the early hours of March 8. After hearing a number of shots nearby and spying a small truck on a dirt trail behind her home, Gay charged into the park to confront the shooters.

“I started hearing shots coming like crazy,” says Gay, who was sitting in her backyard at the time, enjoying a late-night cigarette. “I couldn’t believe it. These guys sounded like they were right next to me. I couldn’t take it any more. I just wanted them to stop.”

She was promptly arrested, handcuffed and taken to Eighth District headquarters where she was charged with defiant trespassing. Surprisingly, despite the controversy of Philadelphia’s deer cull, which has sparked numerous lawsuits and protests, Gay is the first person in Philadelphia to be arrested for violating a curfew instituted to keep citizens out of the park while the cull takes place. She plans to fight the charge, a move that could conceivably land her in jail if she’s found guilty.

Gay, a 59-year-old talent agent who used to manage Teddy Pendergrass, does not deny the primary facts of the charge against her. She entered the park after curfew and sat on a log blaring a radio, blocking the path of the Fairmount Park pickup truck. The issue, she says, is that park officials, namely commission chief of staff Barry Bessler, broke a promise to refrain from shooting deer directly behind her home. Bessler denies the allegation.

“The last two months have been unbelievable,” says Gay, gesturing to a thin stretch of the Pennypack behind her home. Her walls are lined with gold records from Philadelphia International Records stars from the Philly Sound heyday. One photo of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is signed thanking Gay for booking their East Coast shows on an ’80s tour.

“They’ve been carrying on back there with helicopters and rifles,” she says. “It’s like a war zone. This area is the teensiest, tiniest part of the Pennypack. Why do they have to shoot deer back there?”

Bessler, who has managed the park’s deer cull since it began in controversy four years ago, was not surprised by Gay’s arrest. He says he had spoken to her numerous times about keeping cullers from shooting behind her yard. In February, Gay’s live-in mother made local news when she returned a third-place award from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society that she had won for her garden to protest the shooting.

Bessler admits he promised to keep shooters from behind her yard, and he says he kept that promise.

“No one in our operation has shot a deer behind Ms. Gay’s backyard,” Bessler says. “I’ll swear on the biggest stack of Bibles you can find. I told her last year we’d stay away, even though it’s our legal right to shoot back there.”

Bessler said that he has not, however, kept shooters from traveling the paths behind Gay’s home. And he admits that she probably has heard rifle shots from the park’s crew at night, but nothing that would constitute the battlefield Gay describes.

“Look, during the time that we have the curfew [three months] we only shoot in the Pennypack 10 or 12 nights,” Bessler says. “Only two hours a night are available to actually take a shot. There’s no war zone back there.”

Bessler suggests Gay may have encountered some wayward poachers or heard kids with firecrackers -- both are problems that consistently plague the park.

“Once I spoke with [Gay] last year and she said she encountered someone behind her home in ninja garb,” Bessler says. “We don’t go out in ninja garb. It wasn’t us.”

As for poachers, several calls Gay made to Sen. Rick Santorum and the Philadelphia Police Department resulted in an investigation that, according to a letter she received from former Police Commissioner John Timoney, found no trace of illegal hunting in the park.

Gay is expected to appear in the Criminal Justice Center on April 8 to enter a plea in her case. She says she is seeking a delay to consider her legal options. She’s thinking of a counter-lawsuit on the grounds that the cull in her part of Pennypack Park is too close to homes and therefore illegal. She’s still looking for a lawyer.

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