Quote:ST. PETERSBURG — At a bend in the road near Joe's Creek, birds sing and dogs bark. But the rooster no longer crows.
Most mornings, residents would hear the cries of Gilman the Rooster as he sat atop a roof greeting the day. But on Saturday, they awoke to shots from a .45-caliber handgun. Several of them. Boom, boom, boom, boom!
Bobbie Horton heard it. Deanna Schwartz did, too. Then she ran into her 5-year-old's room and peeked through the blinds.
That's when she saw him. A guy who lived in the neighborhood was standing next door, and she heard him declare, "I got him!"
The him being Gilman.
The guy yelling victory being Eric Nicastro, 30, who lives at 5000 74th St. N.
As turns out, Nicastro had been asking recently who owned the rooster. Gilman and the pack of chickens he leads had lived in this unincorporated neighborhood of modest houses near the creek for a few years, but no one could say who owned them.
So Saturday, Nicastro took a BB gun and went after the young auburn cock with a proud red comb, according to authorities. At some point, he upgraded to the handgun and chased the rooster into a neighbor's yard. That's when the shots came and the crows ended for good. Nicastro threw the body into the creek, said Jim Bordner, a spokesman for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
Now I do admit that this guy went about 'solving' his problem in the wrong way...but I have also been woken up every fucking morning by birds. Some assclown feeds the geese that swarm around my bulding so there are about 30-40 of the crap factories that swarm around and make noise every morning between 5:45 and 6 am.
I wish it was legal to go out there and just start shooting the things...but you know the saying, wish in one hand...